Teacher quality, as measured by the ability to move students from wherever they start to a higher level, hopefully proficiency and above, continues to be of upmost importance. This is even more true in Florida, now that we have a majority of students in the state, not attending the public school that they are zoned for, but have a robust charter school sector, and an even greater number of students that are now using state funded scholarships to provide home education or attend over 2400 private schools.
As some of you have noticed, and in fact, even contacted us about, we have not been updating the FLDOE VAM files on a regular basis for the last few years. This initially started when there was a combination of a shift to a new state assessment and the start of Covid education. Both of these unfortunately, for a time made the VAM scores less reliable because of teacher assignment and remote learning and changing assessments. And of course, for the most part the VAM Data is looking at three years of student assessment. As a consequence of all these manufacturers, we chose not to categorize the highest performing teachers based on the damn data for these past few years. We are hopeful that we can once again start relying on the van Data to identify the highest performing teachers in the core tested subjects, perhaps as soon as the end of the 24-25 year.
At a macro level, the challenge is how to increase the quality of the pool of potential teacher candidates, something that has to start by increasing the quality of the K-12 education that is provided in Florida. This is a little bit of a chicken and an egg conundrum, in that the best way to increase the quality of K12 education, is to increase the quality of K12 teachers, but the best way to have highly qualified K-12 teachers, is to have highly qualified students coming out of K-12 that would select two for example teach instead of going into law, science, medicine, etc.
One of the keys until the overall population of K12 candidates with the quality to become highly effective teachers is expanded, is to figure out ways to retain and reward the best teachers that are currently in the classrooms. On this count, charter schools, and private schools have more flexibility about retaining teachers- if a teacher with a proven track record of increasing student performance is thinking about leaving for a reason that relates to compensation, and we know some of the best teachers have other careers open to them, than unlike the regular public school district, a charter or private school could choose to say hey you’re a three year teacher, but you’re getting awesome results so we’d like to retain you, and since we know that years of teaching has very little to do with results, we intend to offer you what would be equivalent to a 10 year step salary to keep you in our school.
Of course, if the atmosphere is not supportive of and does not provide recognition for the teachers that are going above and beyond and getting student results, then it’s unlikely that merely throwing money if the culture is bad will help you retain the best teachers.
These are not easy things to do when it comes to attracting and retaining the most effective teachers, but effective education cannot be accomplished without effective teachers, so in innovation, courage, and education about hard decisions, are part and parcel of retaining and recruiting effective teachers.