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 Rating Teacher Quality:
An Interview with Ken Futernick
by
Solange Castro Belcher
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Dr. Ken Futernick, a professor of education at California State University, Sacramento is the author of the Teacher Qualification Index. He has testified before state senate and assembly committees on matters pertaining to teacher recruitment and retention and assisted Assemblyman Darrell Steinberg's office in the writing of Assembly Bill 833 which would have required the State of California to develop and maintain a teacher qualification index for all public K-12 schools in the state.
Dr. Futernick has written recently on California's response to the Federal No Child Left Behind Act and was interviewed on this subject for a report that aired on National Public Radio. He is also the author of a report titled, "Leading Troubled Schools to the Tipping Point," a school reform plan designed for low-performing, hard to staff schools.
(To read Talk Back comments about this feature, click here!)
"While there are many factors that we could include in a set of ‘opportunity to learn’ standards—the cleanliness and safety of the school, the presence of current textbooks and learning materials—clearly the most important standard would be the qualifications of the teachers at a school."
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TCLA: What is the Teacher Qualification Index?
Ken Futernick: The TQI is a standardized rating system that reflects the credential status and experience level of teachers at every K-12 public school in California. If there are high concentrations of beginning teachers at a given school, their TQI rating will be lower. While we certainly want new teachers to enter the field of teaching, if we have too many beginning teachers at a particular school, and that includes interns, they tend not to be very successful. And they tend not to stay at the school because they lack support from other more experienced teachers. We’re not saying that a school where the average experience level of teachers is higher than another school is necessarily a better-staffed school. But we are saying that a school is likely to be unstable if it has too high of a concentration of beginning teachers.
In addition to the TQI, our web site (www.edfordemocracy.org/tqi) also provides an indication of how underqualified teachers are distributed within each school district in California. We call this a distribution rating and it is a separate rating from the TQI. So every school district has one of four distribution ratings: ‘Very Even,’ ‘Even,’ ‘Uneven,’ or ‘Very Uneven.’ A school district that has a ‘Very Uneven’ distribution is one in which some schools have a high percentages of unqualified teachers and some have a very low percentage of unqualified teachers. In a district with a ‘Very Even’ distribution, all of their schools are staffed pretty much the same way. This distribution rating is important because it serves as a type of equity indicator.
Teacher Qualification Index Ratings
TCLA: What led you to create this site?
KF: I, like many educators, have been aware of the growing number of standards that now affect teachers and schools in California. We now have high academic standards for children which are reflected in the API, we have a high school exit exam, which is going to be enforced in 2004, and we have a new set of standards for teachers. But what we’ve lacked is a different set of standards that reflect students’ opportunity to learn and succeed in school. While there are many factors that we could include in a set of ‘opportunity to learn’ standards—the cleanliness and safety of the school, the presence of current textbooks and learning materials—clearly the most important standard would be the qualifications of the teachers at a school. The TQI and the distribution rating are an attempt to establish an ‘opportunity to learn’ standard—something that provides a baseline index against which we can compare one school or district with another school or district over time.
The No Child Left Behind Act will prohibit high-poverty schools from hiring uncredentialed teachers in the 2005-06 school year. In fact, it says all federally funded schools may only employ ‘highly qualified’ teachers. That’s certainly a step in the right direction—one policy makers in this state have been unwilling to take voluntarily—but the flaw in NCLB is in its broad definition of a highly qualified teacher. A 12 year veteran teacher with a masters degree is, according to NCLB, ‘highly qualified,’ but so is an intern with almost no experience or professional training. What we know about beginning teachers is that many of them leave within the first three years if they don’t receive support and mentoring from more experienced teachers. If the percentage of beginning teachers is too high, there won’t be enough experienced teachers available to provide that support. What is likely to happen is that some schools—those with the greatest need for highly qualified teachers—will be staffed with a high percentages of interns and beginning teachers. While complying with NCLB these schools will almost certainly continue to experience high teacher turnover and poor academic performance.
"The 'success stories' published on the TQI web site demonstrate that it is possible for districts to solve the staffing challenge if administrators and teachers commit to solving the problem together. "
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TCLA: So, basically what the TQI measures, is not so much the quality of the individual teacher, but the quality of the community of teachers, based on the experience of that community.
KF: You’re hitting on an important distinction. We’re not trying to say that a qualified teacher is necessarily a quality teacher, but we do know that a qualified teacher, i.e. one with a credential is more likely to be a high quality or an effective teacher, than one who does not have a credential. But it’s no guarantee. Just as a license to practice medicine is no guarantee that a physician will be competent.
TCLA: Why do so many schools have low TQI ratings? What is the cause of this problem?
KF: I should point out that of the 8,000 schools in the state about 3,500 of them have a TQI rating of 8, 9, 10. So, almost half have a very good TQI rating. At the other end of the index there are about 1200 schools that have a TQI rating of 1, 2 or 3. But these schools are the ones with the greatest need of highly qualified teachers because they are primarily schools with poor children and children who are learning to speak English.
TCLA: So, the distribution of underqualified teachers seems to follow along the lines of income and race?
KF: Yes. The TQI demonstrates once again that the children most likely to be assigned an underqualified teacher or to be placed in a school with high concentrations of beginning teachers are those who are poor and those who are English language learners.
Number of California Public Schools by TQI Rating
TCLA: What can be done?
KF: I think at the state level, policy makers need to rethink some of their reform initiatives. High stakes testing has forced many schools, particularly low API schools, to narrow their curriculum, to focus only on subjects that are tested on the SAT9 and to focus on improving test taking skills. This has driven good teachers away from these schools. I would say that merit pay, too, has proven to be counter productive because it has divided faculty and created resentment in schools already struggling to maintain morale. I believe the state must consider providing differential support measures that would allow hard to staff schools to attract and retain qualified teachers. For example, the state might permit schools with high concentrations of poor and English language learning students to maintain lower class sizes, which would serve to attract and retain more highly qualified teachers. At the district level school officials must pay attention to the data that indicates how well staffed their schools are and in particular to look at distribution patterns of qualified teachers. District officials should not simply shrug their shoulders and say there’s nothing they can do to solve the problem. The “success stories” published on the TQI web site demonstrate that it is possible for districts to solve the staffing challenge if administrators and teachers commit to solving the problem together.
TCLA: TCLA's School Accountability Report Card series encourages students and parents to report on the conditions at their schools. Have you thought about incorporating student and parent input into the TQI?
KF: Student and parent input on the conditions of their schools provides some of the richest data about what is going on in a school, but it is very difficult to incorporate into an index.
TCLA: Where might the TQI go from here?
KF: One thing that I want to incorporate is how well prepared teachers are to teach diverse populations. In the future I want the TQI to reflect the degree to which credentialed teachers are certified to work with students who are English language learners. Schools with high concentrations of diverse learners must be staffed not only with credentialed teachers but teachers with the kind of professional training that will enable them to be successful with these students.
Another area that needs focus is high schools. There are currently thousands of classes staffed by teachers who have a credential but who lack the requisite subject matter knowledge to teach the class. Because the state education code permits schools to make these assignments, there are countless teachers assigned to math and English classes who didn’t major or minor in these subjects. Unfortunately the state has not kept track of these out-of-field assignments. NCLB will force it to do so and when it does we will incorporate this into the TQI ratings for all high schools.
 Teacher Qualification Index on the Education for Democracy site
www.edfordemocracy.org/tqi
The Teacher Qualification Index (TQI) is a standardized rating system that reflects the credential status and experience level of teachers at each public K-12 school in California. Schools receive a rating from 1 to 10 based on the percentage of teachers at the school who are qualified.
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