No part of this may be reproduced in any form — except for brief quotation (not to exceed 1,000 words) in a review or professional work — without prior written permission from NSDC or the authors. D ecades of standards-based school reform have helped identify what students need to know and be able to do. In the words of former IBM CEO Louis V. Gerstner, Jr., these efforts were meant to " drive standards [and accountability] through the schoolhouse door. " But educators and policymakers are recognizing that it is time for Standards-Based Reform 2.0. We need to place a greater priority on strengthening the capacity of educators and building learning communities to deliver higher standards for every child. Enabling educational systems to achieve on a wide scale the kind of teaching that has a substantial impact on student learning requires much more intensive and effective professional learning than has traditionally been available. If we want all young people to possess the higher-order thinking skills they need to succeed in the 21st century, we need educators who possess higher-order teaching skills and deep content knowledge. There are many ways to improve the quality and performance of the nation's education workforce, and many are being tested. States and districts have restructured the staffs at thousands of failing schools. They are seeking to lure better talent into classrooms by recruiting career changers and liberal-arts graduates with rich content knowledge and a willingness to teach. They are revamping their personnel departments, launching new teacher academies, and working to exert greater control over who will teach and in which schools. But these efforts, essential as they are, influence only a small portion of educators. And no matter what states and districts do to bolster the education workforce, they will need to do more and better with the talent they have. This will require a more effective and systematic approach to supporting, developing, and mobilizing the more than three million educators who will teach in and lead our schools. Other fields, from medicine and management to the military, do a far better job of providing ongoing learning opportunities and support for their professionals. But as this report shows, in education, professional learning in its current state is poorly conceived and deeply flawed. Teachers lack time and opportunities to view each other's classrooms, learn from mentors, and work collaboratively. The support and training they receive is …

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Professional learning in the learning profession: A status report on teacher development in the United States and abroad.

Summary Of the more than 1,300 studies identi-fied as potentially addressing the effect of teacher professional development on student achievement in three key con-tent areas, nine meet What Works Clear-inghouse evidence standards, attesting to the paucity of rigorous studies that directly examine this link. This report finds that teachers who receive sub-stantial professional development—an average of 49 hours in the nine studies—can boost their students’ achievement by about 21 percentile points. How does teacher professional development affect student achievement? The connection seems intuitive. But demonstrating it is difficult. Examining more than 1,300 studies identified as potentially addressing the effect of teacher professional development on student achieve-ment in three key content areas, this report finds nine that meet What Works Clearing-house evidence standards. That only nine meet standards attests to the paucity of rigorous studies that directly assess the effect of in-service teacher professional development on student achievement in mathematics, science, and reading and English/language arts.But the results of those studies—that average control group students would have increased their achievement by 21 percentile points if their teacher had received substantial profes-sional development—indicates that provid-ing professional development to teachers had a moderate effect on student achievement across the nine studies. The effect size was fairly consistent across the three content areas reviewed. All nine studies focused on elementary school teachers and their students. About half fo-cused on lower elementary grades (kindergar-ten and first grade), and about half on upper elementary grades (fourth and fifth grades).Six studies were published in peer-reviewed journals; three were unpublished doctoral dissertations. The studies were not particularly recent, ranging from 1986 to 2003.Five studies were randomized controlled trials that meet evidence standards without reserva-tions. Four studies meet evidence standards with reservations (one randomized controlled trial with group equivalence problems and three quasi-experimental designs).Four focused on student achievement in read-ing and English/language arts—unsurprising given the large literature in this content area. Two studies focused on mathemat-ics, two on mathematics and reading and

https://ies.ed.gov/ncee/edlabs/regions/southwest/pdf/rel_2007033_sum.pdf

Reviewing the evidence on how teacher professional development affects student achievement

Sonia Nieto makes student learning the primary objective of multicultural education. She draws on a host of research in learning styles, multiple intelligences and cognitive theories to portray the way students learn. Nieto then takes the reader beyond individual learners to discuss the social context of learning, educational equity, the influence of culture on learning and critical pedagogy. Centering on multicultural education as a transformative process, the text includes many reflections of teachers who have undergone this process and whose experiences will be invaluable to other teachers.

The Light in Their Eyes: Creating Multicultural Learning Communities

The literature base on technology professional development for teachers reveals that there is a long way to go in understanding methods of effective practice with respect to the various impacts of these activities on teaching and learning. In the No Child Left Behind era, with programs like Preparing Tomorrow’s Teachers to Use Technology, the Fund for the Improvement of Post Secondary Education, and E-rate (the schools and library portion of the Universal Service Fund) that have been targeted as No Demonstrated Results, we need to move to a more systematic study of how technology integration occurs within our schools, what increases its adoption by teachers, and the long-term impacts that these investments have on both teachers and students. In addition to the findings of a comprehensive literature review, this article also articulates a systematic evaluation plan that, if implemented, will likely yield the information needed to better understand these important educational issues.

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Professional Development in Integrating Technology Into Teaching and Learning: Knowns, Unknowns, and Ways to Pursue Better Questions and Answers

The Secretary’s report accurately claims that “researchers have found that some teachers are much more effective than others” (2002, p. 7). Studies using valueadded student achievement data have found that student achievement gains are much more influenced by a student’s assigned teacher than other factors like class size and class composition (Sanders & Horn, 1994; Sanders & Rivers, 1996; Wright, Horn, & Sanders, 1997). A recent analysis by Rivkin, Hanushek, and Kain (2001) attributes at least 7% of the total variance in test-score gains to differences in teachers. The Secretary’s report asserts, however, that “there is little evidence that education school course work leads to improved student achievement” (2002, p. 19), stating that the evidence about “knowledge of pedagogy, degrees in education or amount of time spent practice teaching”—which are the “requirements that make up the bulk of current teacher certification regimes”—is surrounded by a “great deal of contention” (p. 8). To support the assertion that “virtually all” of the studies linking certification and improved student outcomes are “not scientifically rigorous,” the Secretary’s report cites a report by Kate Walsh (2001), written for the Baltimore-based Abell Foundation,2 which asserts that there is “no credible research that supports the use of teacher certification as a regulatory barrier to teaching” (p. 5). Unfortunately, Walsh’s report excludes much of the evidence on the topic, misrepresents many research findings, makes inaccurate claims about studies that have examined the consequences In July 2002, the U.S. Secretary of Education issued the Secretary’s Annual Report on Teacher Quality (U.S. Department of Education) as required by the 1998 reauthorization of Title II of the Higher Education Act. In this report titled Meeting the Highly Qualified Teachers Challenge the Secretary essentially argues for the dismantling of teacher education systems and the redefinition of teacher qualifications to include little preparation for teaching. Stating that current teacher certification systems are “broken,” and that they impose “burdensome requirements” for education coursework that make up “the bulk of current teacher certification regimes” (p. 8), the report argues that certification should be redefined to emphasize higher standards for verbal ability and content knowledge and to de-emphasize requirements for education coursework—making student teaching and attendance at schools of education optional and eliminating “other bureaucratic hurdles” (p. 19). These conclusions rest on the following arguments, each of which is addressed in turn in this article: • Teachers matter for student achievement, but teacher education and certification are not related to teacher effectiveness. • Verbal ability and subject matter knowledge are the most important components of teacher effectiveness. • Teachers who have completed teacher education programs are academically weak and are underprepared for their jobs. • Alternative certification programs (ACPs) have academically stronger recruits who are highly effective and have high rates of teacher retention. The report suggests that its recommendations are based on “solid research.” However, none of these arguments has strong empirical support, and the report does not cite the scientific literature that addresses them: Only one reference among the report’s 44 footnotes is to a study that was eventually published in a peer-reviewed journal, and the study’s findings are misrepresented in the report. Most references are to newspaper articles or to documents published by advocacy organizations, some of these known for their vigorous opposition to teacher education.1 Although an accurate review of rigorous research on teacher qualifications and their relationship to student achievement could provide useful guidance to state policymakers, such a review is not to be found in this report. Instead, the Secretary’s report fails to meet the Department of Education’s own standards for the use of scientifically based research to formulate policy. The report cites almost no research that would meet scientific standards, misrepresents findings from a large number of sources, and includes many unsupported statements about teacher education and teacher certification. Whatever the contributions of this report to the debates on teacher quality, an accurate rendering of the research base on these important topics is not one of them. In this article we discuss the research base that treats the arguments made in support of the report’s recommendations and suggest that different conclusions would derive from a well-grounded rendering of the evidence. Research News and Comment

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Defining “Highly Qualified Teachers”: What Does “Scientifically-Based Research” Actually Tell Us?

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Harold Wenglinsky

Papers

How Teaching Matters: Bringing the Classroom Back into Discussions of Teacher Quality.