The Evolving Role of Teachers in Effective Schools

Abstract

There are thousands of studies in the areas of both teacher effects and school effects. In each field, a minority of the studies rise to high levels of rigor. Unfortunately, the number of studies that meld the two fields is strikingly modest, with a great need for additional research. In this chapter, we explore the intersection of the two fields with a particular focus on current issues in teacher effects and how they might inform the school effects research base. The fields of teacher and school effects share a common challenge. Both are attempts to understand and elaborate on what most people intuitively know to be true. Millions of American parents add time to their daily commutes and pay tens of thousands of additional dollars to purchase homes in neighborhoods served by “good schools.” Similarly, they will attend Parent Teacher Association meetings, do volunteer work in the schools, and make multiple stressful visits to principals’ offices to get their children into classes taught by “good teachers” (or to avoid “bad teachers”). Clearly, parents – and students – believe that some teachers and schools are more effective than others. The two fields also share a common problem in their research histories: Both began with years of frustration in attempting to identify precisely “what matters” in terms of academic effectiveness. When the fledgling American Educational Research Association (AERA) commissioned the first Handbook of Research on Teaching (Gage, 1963), the 1000 page, two-column per page tome covered the widest practical range of topics in teaching, but not one of the chapters yielded replicable evidence that anything that teachers did mattered in terms of differentiating measurable student gains on any outcome. Similarly, in school effects, the first major US study of the effects of schools, the much-referenced “Coleman Report” (Coleman et al., 1966; reanalyzed by Jencks, 1972) concluded that neither teachers nor schools had differential effects on student achievement, and that the backgrounds and socioeconomic status of individual students’ families were the determining factor in student achievement.1 In no small part because