Teaching Quality

Teachers are the single greatest influence in a student's academic performance. At ETS, our goal is to produce research-based learning tools and assessments that can be used to advance quality and equity in learning and teaching. Our products and services measure knowledge, skills and abilities; promote learning and educational performance; and support education and professional development for all people.

Highlights

Teacher Leader Model Standards
After two years of research and collaboration, the 39-member Teacher Leadership Exploratory Consortium released the Teacher Leader Model Standards. The Standards are designed to stimulate dialogue among stakeholders of the teaching profession about what knowledge, skills and competencies teachers need to assume leadership roles in their schools, districts and profession, and how teacher leadership can be distinguished from, but work in tandem with, formal administrative leadership roles to support good teaching and promote student learning.

Toward Increasing Teacher Diversity: Targeting Support and Intervention for Teacher Licensure Candidates
National Education Association (NEA) and Educational Testing Service (ETS) have been working collaboratively to support teacher candidates in preparing for The Praxis Series™ of teacher licensure assessments. NEA and ETS wanted to better understand why and how minority candidates struggle with teacher licensure assessments in order to improve interventions that could help address the problem. The report summarizes the results of the data analysis and interviews to provide insight and direction to intervention, describes some model intervention programs that have been developed to assist students, and offers commitments and recommendations for the future.

Tyler Outlines Keys to Measuring Teacher Effectiveness
Education Week published an editorial by Linda Tyler, ETS Vice President and Chief Operating Officer, Teacher Licensure & Certification, in which she lists four technical requirements for teacher effectiveness assessments and explores current efforts to collect data and establish measures of excellent teaching.

Washington ProTeach Portfolio Launches
The Pro Teach Portfolio is open for online registration. The electronic assessment for professional educators is the first large-scale, consequential portfolio assessment that is delivered and scored online in the United States.

ETS Working with Consortium of Stakeholders to Develop Model Standards for Teacher Leadership
Working with a consortium of national organizations, teacher leaders, principal leaders, IHEs and interested state agencies, ETS facilitated the development of model standards for teacher leadership. Draft model standards are published for public comment.

ETS Innovations Explores Quality in Education
This fall 2009 issue of ETS's magazine, Innovations, focuses on the issues affecting teacher quality and presents ideas for improving teacher and school-leader effectiveness and for expanding professional opportunities within schools.

MetLife® Survey of the American Teacher 2009
The MetLife Survey of the American Teacher: Collaborating for Student Success examines the views of teachers, principals and students about respective roles and responsibilities, current practice and priorities for the future (2009). The Survey report was released as a series during the first quarter of 2010 with the following parts:

• Part 1: Effective Teaching and Leadership examines views about responsibility and accountability; what collaboration looks like in schools, and if and to what degree it is currently practiced.
• Part 2: Student Achievement examines views on student goals, teacher expectations, and what educators believe would increase student achievement.
• Part 3: Teaching as a Career examines collaboration in the context of teacher professional growth, experience level and career path.

Scholastic Survey
Scholastic and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation asked 40,000 of our nation's public school teachers for their thoughts on American Education with the goal of placing teachers' voices at the center of the discourse around education reform.

ETS Research

ETS Policy Notes — After the Bell Rings: Learning Outside of the Classroom and Its Relationship to Student Academic Achievement
This issue of ETS Policy Notes (Vol. 18, No. 1) provides highlights from the "Addressing Achievement Gaps" symposium held in Washington, D.C. on October 5–6, 2009.

Developing High-Potential Youth Program: A Return On Investment Study for U.S. Programs
This report examines the work of Goldman Sachs Foundation U.S. grantees in developing high-potential youth program areas.

National Education Standards: Getting Beneath the Surface
With another drive for national education standards gathering steam, this 2009 publication from ETS reviews and explores the debate.

Exploring What Works in Science Instruction: A Look at the Eighth-Grade Science Classroom
This Policy Information Report analyzes data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress to provide clues that teachers may be able to use to increase the science achievement of their students.

Chasing the High School Graduation Rate: Getting the Data We Need and Using It Right
This Policy Information Perspective provides a status report on efforts to measure the high school graduation rate more accurately and use it more constructively.

Parsing the Achievement Gap II
This Policy Information Report follows up on a 2003 report Parsing the Achievement Gap: Baselines for Tracking Progress. This updated report tracks 16 factors related to academic performance, ranging from low birth weight to teacher quality. While some gaps have narrowed, other have widened.

Windows on Achievement and Inequality
This Policy Information Report provides a panoramic view of educational achievement by examining a variety of data and measures beyond those that are typically reported.

Hispanicity and Educational Inequality: Risks, Opportunities and the Nation's Future
The 2009 Tomás Rivera lecture explores the opportunities and challenges provided by the rapidly growing school-age Hispanic population in the United States.

ETS Policy Notes — Preschool Education: New Jersey and the Nation
This issue of ETS Policy Notes (Volume 17, No. 2) provides highlights from a Policy Forum that explored the state of preschool education in New Jersey and the nation.

Teacher Quality in a Changing Policy Landscape: Improvements in the Teacher Pool
A report examining the relationship between improvements in the academic quality of America's teaching force and an ever-increasing focus on policy activity aimed at improving teacher quality.

Models for Effective and Scalable Teacher Professional Development
The minute-to-minute and day-by-day use of assessment for learning holds great potential to change the trajectory of student learning in U.S. classrooms.

How Structure and Focus Support Teacher Learning
This paper describes a teacher learning community that focused on assessment for learning (AfL) and examines the structures and supports that were created to sustain this focus.

Other Research

The Widget Effect: If teachers are so important, why do we treat them like widgets?
Effective teachers are the key to student success. Yet our school systems treat all teachers as interchangeable parts, not professionals. Excellence goes unrecognized and poor performance goes unaddressed. This indifference to performance disrespects teachers and gambles with students' lives.

Beyond the Bubble
Students today are growing up in a world overflowing with a variety of high-tech tools, from computers and video games to increasingly sophisticated mobile devices. And unlike adults, these students don't have to adjust to the information age — it will be all they've ever known. Their schools are gradually following suit, integrating a range of technologies both in and outside of the classroom for instructional use. But there's one day a year when laptops power down and students' mobile computing devices fall silent, a day when most schools across the country revert to an era when whiteboards were blackboards, and iPhones were just a twinkle in some techie's eye — testing day.

The Teachers of 2030: Creating a Student-Centered Profession for the 21st Century
In The Teachers of 2030: Creating a Student-Centered Profession for the 21st Century, Barnett Berry invites policymakers and teacher leaders to rethink today's teaching policies by imagining the knowledge, skills and qualities teachers must have in the year 2030 — just two decades from now. To support this discussion, Berry introduces the voices of 12 accomplished American teachers who are currently writing a book on the future of teaching. This TeacherSolutions 2030 team, supported by Metlife Foundation, has identified four emergent realities that they believe will shape education over the next 20 years.

Leading Gen Y Teachers: Strategies for School Leaders
A generational transition is occurring in U.S. public school classrooms. Baby Boom teachers (those born between 1946 and 1964) are approaching retirement age, and many of their colleagues from Generation X (those born between 1965 and 1976) are entering their mid-career stage. The newest generation in the teaching workforce is Generation Y (those born roughly between 1977 and 1995).

Toward the Structural Transformation of Schools: Innovations in Staffing
The transformation of schools means that education will become "unbundled" — no longer wrapped in a neat brick-and-mortar school package, with teachers with similarly inadequate training struggling to differentiate their instruction in a homogenized one-teacher-per-classroom delivery model.