New Jersey, Ohio Ask Arkansas Professor for Advice on Standards, Teacher Training

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. – University of Arkansas professor Sandra Stotsky, a nationally known expert on K-12 standards and teacher training, will take part in a panel discussion on reforming teacher recruitment and training at the Manhattan Institute in New York this week. The Center for Civic Innovation at the Manhattan Institute invited Stotsky to make a presentation at its April 23 conference on how improving teacher quality is the key to urban education reform.

Next week, she will make a presentation at an April 28 conference in Little Rock on preparing highly qualified teachers in Arkansas. Stotsky, who holds the Twenty-First Century Chair on Teacher Quality, will suggest “Ideas for a Teacher Quality Report Card” at this conference sponsored by the Office for Education Policy in the College of Education and Health Professions at the University of Arkansas.

She recently submitted invited papers to the Ohio Senate and the New Jersey State Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights on methods, resources and procedures for improving K-12 standards and teacher training. Stotsky presented her paper to Ohio’s Senate Education Committee in Columbus last week.

Stotsky has spent more than a decade evaluating the quality of state standards across the country and advising many states on how to create academically strong standards. Her expertise in this area is based on her work as Senior Associate Commissioner at the Massachusetts Department of Education from 1999 to 2003. In that role, she was in charge of complete revisions of all of the Massachusetts preK-12 standards, teacher and administrator licensing regulations, teacher tests and professional development criteria.

On the 2007 National Assessment of Educational Progress tests (commonly referred to as the Nation’s Report Card), Massachusetts’ students scored first in grades 4 and 8 in mathematics and in grade 4 in reading, and tied for first in grade 8 in reading.

Massachusetts’ low-income students also made stunning gains. When the scores of low-income students were compared with the scores of low-income students in the other states, the Massachusetts low-income students were tied for first place in mathematics in grades 4 and 8 and in reading in grade 4. In grade 8 in reading, they were tied for second place.

The Ohio Senate Education Committee invited Stotsky to give testimony April 15 on how to establish high-quality K-12 standards. She was asked to speak in response to concerns about Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland’s plans to revamp K-12 education in Ohio. In her prepared remarks to the committee, Stotsky said that the Ohio education standards are mediocre and that proposed changes may make them worse.

She described the reform effort she led in Massachusetts and listed public resources available in the four content areas of English or reading, mathematics, science, and history and social sciences. She made several recommendations including a critical review of content standards in each subject and gave a step-by-step description of the review process. Stotsky advised that teachers and curriculum specialists within the state should be part of that process along with doctoral-level academic experts and that a public comment period must also be incorporated.

The full text can be read at http://edexcellence.net/ohio/Stotsky2.pdf.

Stotsky was also invited to submit a written statement on teacher licensing standards, teacher quality and urban student achievement to the New Jersey State Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. Her ideas will be discussed at a May meeting of the committee.

She wrote that the use of academically weak licensure tests for assessing prospective teachers’ academic knowledge, as well as the use of instructionally biased licensure tests for assessing their knowledge of useful teaching practices, in effect, discriminates against urban students. Urban students depend far more than do suburban students on the academic quality and effectiveness of their teachers for fostering their academic growth, she wrote.

According to Stotsky, federal and state policies must ensure that teacher licensure tests of subject area knowledge are sufficiently demanding academically, and that licensure tests of teaching practices are sufficiently evidence-based, so that urban teachers begin their teaching careers with more adequate academic backgrounds than they now do and with a familiarity with teaching practices that are supported by evidence from high-quality research.

Teachers’ command of the subject matter they teach is the chief characteristic of effective teachers that has been identified by high-quality research, according to a U.S. Department of Education study in 2008 that Stotsky cited.

“This does not mean that other teacher traits might not be related to gains in student achievement; it simply means that high-quality research studies have not yet identified these other teacher traits,” she wrote.

Stotsky advised the New Jersey committee to make two recommendations to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission: that the commission vote to ask the U.S. Department of Education to require all states to use common sets of academically demanding standards drawn up by academic discipline-based organizations as the basis for the state-mandated subject area licensure tests for prospective teachers, and that the commission vote to ask the U.S. Department of Education to require all states to use a common set of pedagogical standards/competencies that are based on a body of high-quality research evidence for the tests of pedagogical methods and practices that states may require of all prospective teachers.