**Archived Information**

DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION

THE NATIONAL COMMISSION ON MATHEMATICS AND SCIENCE

FOR THE 21^ST^ CENTURY

DR. LINDA DARLING-HAMMOND

SEPTEMBER 23, 1999

TRANSCRIPT BY: FEDERAL NEWS SERVICE

620 NATIONAL PRESS BUILDING

WASHINGTON, DC 20045

**\[Accompanying PowerPoint slides are referenced in brackets throughout
the transcript.\]**

DR. DARLING-HAMMOND: (In progress) The National Commission on Teaching
and America\'s Future, which I directed some years ago, which was
chaired by Governor Hunt, and in fact at the launch of that report, he
was unable at the National Press Club to launch the report because he
had just had a hurricane in North Carolina. So, we had him online with
his boots on and his chainsaw. And Governor Edgar from Illinois did
launch that report.

It looked hard at the issues of student achievement, teacher quality,
teaching quality, and school conditions, which influence how teachers
teach as well as what they know. And today I\'m going to talk a bit
about supply and demand in quality, because it\'s going to concern you
throughout your remarks. I\'m going to leave a lot of things unsaid, and
will be glad to answer questions, but really just try to map the field
for you.

# Demand for and Job Satisfaction of Math/Science Teachers

And I\'m going to try to use my teacher voice because I want to use some
overheads. And so, if you can\'t hear, please raise your hand if it\'s
hard for you to hear. **\[See Slide 1\]** You already know that part of
the issue here is that we have a growing demand for teachers generally.
We are going to move from a teaching force that used to number about
2-1/2 million to a teaching force of about 3.3 million early in the next
decade. So, there\'s retirement that\'s pushing that, and growth in
enrollment of students that\'s pushing that. And math and science are no
different from other subjects in terms of that.

However, we don\'t actually have an overall teaching shortage in the
country. We have a big distribution problem of teachers. **\[See Slide
2\]** We have states that have surpluses of teachers. There are states
that can only hire one out of ten of the teachers they train. And we
have states that have shortages of teachers. And there\'s a complex set
of reasons for this that I would be glad to go into. They have to do
with how many teacher education institutions there are, what the salary
schedules are, and a variety of things that have to do with how well
states do with producing and keeping teachers.

But we also have a hodge-podge of licensing requirements across the
states that make it hard to get teachers from the places where they
train to the places where they\'re needed. So, part of your issue is not
just production, but it\'s also distribution and then it\'s also keeping
people in, once you\'ve got them there, and retention is an equally
large issue.

Back in \'94, which is the last national data we have, this chart shows
that schools were beginning to have difficulty filling teaching
positions in mathematics. About 20 percent of all schools had some
trouble filling vacancies in mathematics. About 20 percent in physical
science, about 16 percent in life science, that\'s been the norm for a
long time. It\'s been easier to find life science teachers than physical
science teachers, math teachers have been more difficult to find than
either. But, as I say, in some districts and some states, you will hear
that there is not that same difficulty.

Whenever I talk about supply and demand, and I think Emily Feistrizer,
too, she talks about the same issues and writes about them, people will
call up and say, I have two master\'s degrees in mathematics and in
teaching, and I can\'t find a job. Where are these jobs that you\'re
talking about? It\'s not a totally simple picture with respect to
getting people into the profession and keeping them there.

I actually do think, though, that we\'ve had an under supply of math
teachers, qualified math teachers, for about 40 years, since the 1950s.
And, we dented that for a while with a variety of programs in the 1970s,
\'60s and \'70s, Teacher Corps, NDSL loans for people who would go into
teaching and have their loans repaid. So that by the late \'70s we had
almost no teachers who were in schools operating without the
qualifications for their positions, whatever the qualifications were at
that time. We had growth in demand since then, and then the gap has
grown because those programs that I just described were eliminated in
1981 and have not been replaced yet in our national policy scene by
incentives to ensure that we have some ways to recruit people in and, of
course, keep them in the profession is the other part of it.

**\[See Slide 3\]** One theory about the supply and demand situation,
these are all competing and in various ways legitimate parts of the
picture, is that teachers annual salaries are so low. This is 1991, you
can see that compared to a lot of other fields, teachers, this includes
child care workers, I believe, preschool teachers as well,
pre-kindergarten, so it\'s a little lower than it would otherwise be,
but way at the bottom of the list. If you compare teachers\' salaries to
what engineers get, for example, and some countries pin teachers\'
salaries to the salaries of engineers, so that they don\'t have
incentives for unwanted shortfalls in math and science, in particular,
which are the competing school-based subjects, that there\'s a huge
opportunity cost, particularly for folks in math and science, to go into
teaching.

**\[See Slide 4\]** And in contrast to other countries, which pay most
of the way for people to get trained in teaching, in many other
countries the government recruits people into teaching and pays all of
their college training costs, which are sometimes more extensive
training requirements, and then sets salaries in a way that\'s immediate
to the market, and usually does not allow inequalities in salaries in
countries in Western Europe and parts of Asia. We have unequal salaries
across districts, the burden of getting trained falls on the candidate,
so it\'s a very different circumstance for getting people in.

The other part of the story is job satisfaction, keeping people in. You
heard Secretary Riley mention the fact that math teachers and science
teachers appear to leave more frequently for reasons of dissatisfaction
with teaching, and with the way they're treated, and among the things
that the study he cited was talking about is differences in how current
teachers and those who have left for other professions feel particularly
about issues like influence over policy, decision-making input,
professional prestige, administrative supports. So those are all part of
the issue as well of keeping people once you\'ve got them.

Now ‑‑

QUESTION: Can I ask a question? For people that are leaving science
teaching, are they going into other science-related professions, or do
we know anything about where they\'re going?

DR. DARLING-HAMMOND: There is a little bit of data about where people go
when they leave teaching, but it\'s not very fine-tuned in terms of what
fields they go into. Most of them are going from math and science to
other math and science-related fields. But we don\'t know much about the
specifics of their jobs.

In general, people who leave teaching go into fields that don\'t pay a
significantly higher salary, but I believe working in Silicon Valley
these days, that's probably not the case for math and science teachers.

QUESTION: Your list of reasons why people left is a polite list. One of
the things I can think of offhand would be teachers who are treated
shabbily by administrators and the other thing is being put in what I
call an untenable teaching situation of which a wide variety...

DR. DARLING-HAMMOND: Yes. I\'m going to say more about that, and you\'re
going to see something about that in a minute. I want to move
expeditiously because I know our time is limited, and people have planes
to catch.

[Slipshod Recruitment (and Merrow Report Video Clip)]{.underline}

**\[See Slide 5\]** As a consequence of many factors, including this
growth in demand, we\'ve had a growing number of people being hired into
teaching without having met their state standards either in the content
field or with respect to knowledge about teaching and learning. About 27
percent of newly hired teachers in 1994 were hired with either no
license, or a sub-standard license in their field. That has been
somewhat greater in math and science. Often you\'ll hear it said that
this is a function of shortages, the inability to find candidates. I
want to show you a little excerpt from a video tape, if we can get that
queued up, that also poses some of the complexities of the situations of
teaching and the ways in which districts hire, particularly math and
science teachers this deals with, which contrast the situation, some of
you may have seen this on the "Merrow Report" a week ago, the situation
in Oakland which traditionally hires a large number of unqualified
teachers, and nearby New Haven, which traditionally hires no unqualified
teachers, and has a surplus even though New Haven actually has lower per
pupil expenditures than Oakland.

Go ahead and run it. This will take about five minutes.

\[Video\]

MERROW: So does the fact of widespread out of field teaching prove there
is a teacher shortage? Not really, what it does tells us is that many
school systems have low standards, often are badly managed and seem to
operate on the misguided assumption that any teacher can teach any
subject.

MERROW: But there are classrooms without qualified math and science
teachers. School systems say they just cannot find teachers. for
example, inside this portable classroom at Bret Harte Middle School in
Oakland, California, is an eighth grade math class that\'s been without
a regular math teacher for most of the year.

MERROW: How many math teachers have you had this year?

BOY: Let\'s see, there is Mr. Berry, Miss Gaines, Mr. Lee, Mr. Dijon,
Mr. Franklin, Coach Brown was one of our substitutes one day.

GIRL: We had Miss Nakasako, we had Miss Gaines, we had Miss Elmore, we
had this other man named \... he had like curly hair his name was Mr.
Umm\...

MERROW: So you\'ve had so many teachers you can\'t remember all their
names?

GIRL: Can\'t remember \... Yeah.

MERROW: A few miles away, at Oakland High School this ninth grade
science class has had nothing but substitutes all year long. The entire
year without a certified science teacher.

MERROW: What has that been like? Having what 16 teachers or seven or
nine, during the year?

BOY: It\'s just weird, it\'s like we have to get used to a new teacher
every couple of weeks or so.

BOY: I\'m feeling short handed, cause this is the third year. Ever since
I got in junior high school I haven\'t had a science teacher.

MERROW: So you\'ve had substitutes?

BOY: All three years.

GIRL: All we learn is like the same thing all over again, when a new
teacher comes, sometimes we gotta skip chapters and start all over
again, and it\'s difficult.

MERROW: Have you learned much science this year?

BOY: Nope.

BOY: Not really. Haven\'t had a chance to.

NANCY CARUSO: It breaks my heart.

MERROW: Nancy Caruso teaches science at Oakland High School.

CARUSO: People have come from those classes over there and they come
down and they beg me, \'Can I get into your class, please I want to
learn, I need a science class,\' and they\'re not getting it.

MERROW: Oakland would appear to have a teacher shortage. But that may
depend on whom you ask.

KAREN SCHEUERMANN: And I heard there was a teacher shortage. Right. And
I bought it.

MERROW: Karen Scheuermann could have filled the opening for a science
teacher at Oakland High School. But mistakes on the part of the school
district blocked her path. Sheuermann, a fully credentialed science
teacher, applied for a job in 1997. She had trouble getting an
application.

KAREN SCHEUERMANN: I called twice and got no response at all. And I
finally faxed a request, and then I got their application.

MERROW: And you sent out application saying, here I am, with all these
credentials.

SCHEUERMANN: Right

MERROW: Are you interested? And, what did they write back9

SCHEUERMANN: They don\'t. They just, if they have an opening, they\'ll
call you for an interview is usually the way it goes, and nobody called
me.

MERROW: Nobody called you.

SCHEUERMANN: Right.

MERROW: Apparently the Oakland school district gets in the way of a lot
of teachers who want to work there. Greg Fanslow who applied to teach
science and Patricia Arabia, who wanted to teach social studies, made
numerous trips to the central office to try to arrange interviews.

GREG FANSLOW: And I asked at that time to speak with the recruiter, and
I was immediately asked you know, this question, which I\'m sure that
you\'ve heard, \"Do you have an appointment?\" And that\'s pretty much
the glass wall.

PATRICIA ARABIA: They needed people so I went straight to the
administration office, and I couldn\'t get anyone to give me the
appropriate application. Nobody understood what I was asking for. To me
it's been a sense of; they don\'t know the process down at the
administration building. They can\'t help me get in to the process and
it\'s just, they\'re very unwelcoming.

MERROW: Karen Scheuermann who never got a response to her first
application tried again in June of 1998.

MERROW: You applied in \'97 and heard nothing, applied again in June of
1998 and didn\'t hear anything until January of \'99, long after the
school year had started, by which time you had moved out of town. We\'re
going to go the Oakland school district do you want us to ask what
happened to your file?

SCHEUERMANN: Sure.

MERROW: I spent some time with people who tried to get jobs in Oakland.
Would you have their files?

GARCIA: I would hope so, yes.

MERROW: Diana Garcia, Director of Personnel for Oakland, asked an
assistant to look for Scheuermann\'s application.

ASSISTANT: I don\'t have an application for her, for this year, but we
have another tracking system here where we send out a response card.

GARCIA: So you should be able to pull it up by name if you type in the
name?

MERROW: But Scheuermann\'s name was not in the computer file either.

GARCIA: Unless we misspelled her name.

GARCIA\'S ASSISTANT: This is her application.

MERROW: Finally, Garcia\'s assistant found her file.

GARCIA\'S ASSISTANT: I guess she was contacted asking her about the
position and it said \'please file,\' she said she was no longer
interested.

MERROW: It\'s no wonder she was not interested. Oakland contacted her on
March 3rd, 1999, nearly two years after she first applied.

MERROW**:** How do you explain this?

SCHEUERMANN: Either there isn\'t a teacher shortage, or else there\'s a
lot of incompetence in the system. It\'s got to be one or the other.

MERROW: In the paper maze of Oakland\'s personnel office, Greg
Fanslow\'s application sat for five months before Oakland finally asked
IBM in for an interview.

FANSLOW: I got a phone call from somebody, and they were offering me
some sort of an intent to hire, or something that wasn\'t specifically a
job, but that they were going to, I guess, put me in a pool of people
that were hirable\.... And I say to them, \"You know, you don\'t have a
job for me to fill specifically, but yet it\'s less than a week before
the semester starts.\" And she said to me, \"You know, well, I don\'t
know when the semester starts.\"

MERROW: That\'s when Greg Fanslow gave up on Oakland he\'s now teaching
in neighboring Berkeley.

MERROW: Have you given up on Oakland?

ARABIA: Yeah probably. I would \... it would depend what school I was
offered.

MERROW: Do you have an application in?

ARABIA: Yeah.

MERROW: What have you heard from them?

ARABIA: Nothing.

MERROW: Do you still want to be a teacher?

SCHEUERMANN: Well, I will be. I mean, I am, I\'m just, I\'m going to go
through a different door, though, from doing that in a museum of
science. I\'m working on being a museum teacher now, so\...

MERROW: Given up on the public schools?

SCHEUERMANN: Yeah I have.

ARABIA: Kids aren\'t getting teachers and the teachers can\'t get in.

RECEPTIONIST: Oakland Unified School district, public information.

MERROW: Garcia was hired a year ago to fix things up.

GARCIA: Our job postings are here.

MERROW: She\'s made it easier to get an application, and now all
applications are acknowledged. Garcia intends to computerize the system
to reduce paperwork. She has reorganized the staff and has added seven
people to the department.

DIANA GARCIA: I\'m fully aware of the criticism that still is out there
and I\'m making changes accordingly.

MERROW: If Garcia needs a model of competence and efficiency, she can
find it just a few miles from Oakland, in new haven, California.

JENNIFER ROOT: Here I called to see if the job was vacant, and within 48
hours I was hired.

MERROW: Jennifer Root earned her classroom license in Minnesota. She
went on line to apply for a teaching position in New Haven.

JENNIFER ROOT: New Haven you can fill out the application on‑line.
Everyplace else they need to mail you the application you fill it out
and mail it back. Here you just go to the computer and you can fill out
the application on the spot.

ASSISTANT SUPERINTENDENT DONNA UYEMOTO: If they have an e­mail address, I
will respond to say, \"I just received your application. Can you please
follow up by sending or faxing your resume and letters of recommendation
to complete your file?\"

MERROW: Electronic applications are received by New Haven Assistant
Superintendent Donna Uyemoto.

MERROW: So, my application, my resume, my letters of reference and so
on, those are all\...

UYEMOTO: Electronically scanned. And so now the principal does not have
to walk down to the district office, nor do I have to fax paper
applications to them. They can access, on line, through the 4optics\'
system that we have here.

MERROW: How did this interview take place.

JENNIFER ROOT: They told me to go to my nearest Kinko\'s location and
they put me in a conference room and I sat down in front of a TV and saw
them and they were doing the same thing in California at the same time.

DONNA UYEMOTO: During that interview, if we get a good sense that this
is a good candidate, at the conclusion of the interview, we can offer a
contract.

MERROW: Because enrollment is growing in New Haven, t14e district hires
about 80 teachers a year. Oakland, which is four times larger, has to
find about 500 new teachers every year. Not because enrollment is
increasing, but because about 20% of its teachers quit every year.

CARUSO: I need somebody to pass out the trays, bottles, the candles.

MERROW: Science teacher Nancy Caruso says she\'s leaving.

NANCY CARUSO: I\'m burnt out, you know, because I have to like bring all
my own supplies. I don\'t get really any support. I had no water, and I
was supposed to teach science. I was toting water from a decaying toilet
basically, little gallon containers, one at a time, and it was just very
frustrating for me. And if you look around, you know, a decaying
building. It\'s graffiti ridden, trash everywhere, so the frustration
level for me is high, because it seems like nothing that could get done
gets done. And it\'s frustrating.

MERROW: Are school systems creating a teacher shortage by driving good
teachers away? Linda Darling Hammond thinks so.

LINDA DARLING‑HAMMOND: Almost all of the shortages are self­-inflicted.

MERROW: Self‑inflicted?

DARLING‑ HAMMOND: Yeah, because states and districts that haven\'t
looked at how to recruit and attract teachers, how to ensure that they
retain teachers, continually create for themselves this revolving door.

MERROW: In Oakland where there is a revolving door, there is a teacher
shortage, about 20 percent leave every year. Anthony Cody teaches
science at Bret Harte Middle School in Oakland.

ANTHONY CODY: The problem is that we\'ve become essentially
sharecroppers for other districts. We\'re growing them, and they\'re
harvesting them, because we do not have the conditions necessary to keep
them.

CHRIS GARCIA: First of all I think you need to decide which colors you
want to use on your individual graphs.

MERROW: Chris Garcia left Oakland to teach in new haven, even though in
her case, it meant making slightly less money.

CHRIS GARCIA: I wanted a change of location.

MERROW: A change of location, though it\'s really only 10 or 15 miles
away?

GARCIA: Well, but there\'s also a change in the support teachers get in
this district. This district is known for giving a lot of teacher
support.

MERROW: Support for teachers played a role in Andrew Ullmer\'s decision
to move from Chicago to New Haven.

MERROW: I think in a lot of places around the country for new teachers
it\'s a sink or swim: \"You\'ve got the job, there\'s your room, go
teach.\"

ANDREW ALMER: My first year here has just been smooth, very smooth. And
it\'s been challenging at times, but without the support I have gotten I
would be definitely sinking.

MERROW: Llike all certified first year teachers in New Haven, Andrew
gets help on the job from a veteran teacher. His mentor is Lisa
Metzinger.

MERROW: And this is your job, you just watch Andrew?

LISA METZINGER: No, I watch several other teachers throughout the
district.

MERROW: How many?

METZINGER: Close to twenty.

MERROW: So the idea is to support new teachers.

METZINGER: Right, so we provide them support through lesson planning and
then we also provide them support through assessment.

ASSISTANT SUPERINTENDENT JIM O\'LAUGHLIN: We make it very difficult for
a new teacher to fail. The first couple years of teaching are very
difficult. There\'s a lot to learn.

MERROW: Jim O\'Laughlin directs recruiting and hiring for New Haven.

JIM O\'LAUGHLIN: Teachers need to have a high level of support, if they
are going to be successful, be comfortable. And when you have
successful, comfortable people, then they\'re going to stay with you.

MERROW: There is no teacher shortage in new haven. The district has ten
applicants for every vacancy, but neighboring Oakland cannot hold on to
its teachers.

NANCY CARUSO: What they do is, to retain young, new teachers, they give
them the hardest classes, the most challenging classes, the most
preparations, so they have like maybe four different classes that they
have to prepare for every day, and they expect that that\'s going to
make them excited about teaching. It\'s not really conducive to keeping,
and retaining young, enthusiastic people. They get burnt. And then they
want to go out to the 'burbs.

MERROW: Why do teachers leave Oakland?

ANTHONY CODY: They leave Oakland because the salary is significantly
less than they can get in other districts, because the working
conditions generally are harder. Um those are two big factors that keep
people or chase them away.

MERROW: Now is Oakland an anomaly? Is there more than one Oakland around
the country?

LINDA DARLING‑ HAMMOND: There are, unfortunately, a lot of districts
that have not yet taken seriously the issue of how to, you know, hire
support and keep good teachers, and, unfortunately, a lot of them are in
urban districts where the teachers are treated almost as badly as the
kids.

MERROW: The official response to the situation we\'re describing has
been to spend money.

\[Video ends\]

DR. DARLING-HAMMOND: It goes on to show that that wonderful science
teacher that we saw who was toting the water is also leaving that school
district. But I think it\'s a few more minutes into the film.

I think that raises for you the issues I would have raised in a less
engaging way pretty vividly, and confirms what we discovered when we
were doing the work of the National Commission on Teaching. There are
real shortfalls of teachers in some fields. There are inadequate numbers
of people preparing in some fields, and that math, I think, is one of
them that we really have to take seriously, and to some extent physical
science. But we found over and over again the story that a district had
surplus, had adequate numbers of qualified teachers, and were not even
able to process their applications. In New York City at the time that we
did our research, there were about 4,500 openings in a given year, there
were 33,000 applicants, 28,000 of whom were qualified, people who went
through programs like Bank Street College of Education, Teachers College
of Columbia, would try to start applying a year, they started applying
before they got into their training program, that\'s the first thing you
did, you know, to sign up for the program and then start trying to work
with the board of ed. And in August of the year after they\'d graduated,
they\'d still be waiting to get an interview, and would end up having to
take jobs elsewhere because they wanted to teach, and they weren\'t sure
they\'d be able to teach if they stayed in that queue.

Los Angeles, about three years ago, put in place an early retirement
package, and bought out the contracts of several thousand teachers, not
so old, 45, 50 years old, and turned around and hired hundreds of
unqualified teachers because they would be cheaper. There are stories
that redound in Compton and Pasadena and Louisiana about folks with lots
of credentials who can\'t get hired because they cost too much on the
salary schedule, and they cost a few thousand dollars more if they have
more experience, or if they have a master\'s degree, and so on.

That\'s not the whole story, but it is an important part of the story
that goes on. One of the things, it\'s different from state to state.
Some states are very focused on recruiting and preparing high quality
teachers, and keeping them in the profession, and don\'t hire folks who
aren\'t well prepared. About a dozen states require a major in the
field, and a very rigorous program of preparation in order to teach, and
among those are the highest scoring states on math and science in the
country, and they have the lowest shortages because they offer them
incentives to teaching that are comparable.

So, I want to make the point, **\[See Slide 6\]** this is from our work
at the commission, that part of the story of supply and demand is the
recruitment story, the screening process that may cause bottlenecks, the
unprofessional treatment of applicants, the hiring decisions sometimes
delayed until the school year starts, teacher assignment and transfer
policies, obstacles to teacher mobility, people who can\'t go to another
district because they can\'t receive the same salary. A big one is lack
of licensing reciprocity among states. There have for some time been
surpluses of teachers in places like Kansas and Minnesota and Wisconsin
and Iowa and Connecticut and Maine, folks from those states have a hard
time getting to places like California, Florida, and others that have
shortfalls because there are so many ‑‑ there are so many different
licensing hoops and requirements. It\'s a national issue that we need to
begin to pay attention to. And then, things like being unable to carry
your pension benefits.

# Influence of Teacher Qualifications on Student Achievement

**\[See Slide 7\]** The result of this is that about roughly 30 percent
of mathematics teachers are teaching with less than a minor in their
field at the secondary school level. And this has been true over a
period of time from the late 1970s until into late 1980s and still into
the \'90s. That is also true in some other fields. It\'s much less true
in science than it is in mathematics. So, there are different kinds of
conditions operating in those domains. And, we found that about 56
percent of high school students taking a physical science course were
being taught by somebody who had less than a minor in that field. And
depending on the school system, as many as 50 percent of students in
low-income, high-minority schools studying mathematics with a teacher
who did not have a degree or certificate in his or her field.

So, of course, it\'s in the context now of states having standards for
students to meet in order to graduate in mathematics, and sometimes in
science, certainly in other fields as well, where they may not have even
had teachers who were qualified in the field, and yet they have to meet
the same standard as other students who had better supports.

**\[See Slide 8\]** I won\'t take a lot of time to make the next set of
points, other than to say there\'s a lot of evidence that the qualities
of teachers, one of the most important determinant of how kids do on
achievement. This is from a study that looked at kids who had teachers
over three years who were low in effectiveness, or average in
effectiveness, or high in effectiveness, and those who were subjected to
three teachers in a row who were low in effectiveness scored on this
particular measure, which is fifth grade math scores, 50 percentile
points lower than those who had three teachers in a row who were high in
effectiveness. The journal that published this is an administrative
newsletter. It suggested that administrators should try not to assign a
kid to more than two ineffective teachers in a row, the moral of the
story. We might want to try another moral from this story, which is that
we ought to be working hard to ensure that teachers have the tools, have
the knowledge, to be highly effective.

QUESTION: How are they an ineffective teacher?

DR. DARLING-HAMMOND: In this case, the measure was over time they looked
at the teachers, they parceled out statistically things like
heterogeneity of the class, and students\' poverty levels, and the class
sizes, and looked at those who had made contributions to learning gains
over the period of many years in their careers of different sizes. And
they were labeled high, medium and low on effectiveness.

Then they looked, they went back in to the data set, having labeled the
teachers in that way, and looked at the outcomes for kids in a
particular year in the teachers\' classes.

Again, I want to leave us time for questions, so I don\'t want to get
too deeply into each of the studies, **\[See Slide 9\]** but there have
been a variety of pieces of research that have suggested that while a
chunk of what happens for kids in achievement is the home and family
factors, their demographics around income, parent education, and so on,
a big chunk of the variation in achievement, in this case about half of
what was measured in this study, is school related factors, and teacher
qualifications and class sizes often come up, and generally speaking,
teacher qualifications are shown to account for a greater share of the
difference than class sizes, although both are important. And it\'s not
to say one shouldn\'t have smaller classes, but one will not want to do
that by trading off against teacher qualifications as California did.
There are better ways to do it, such as the way that Tennessee managed
its experiment with class size.

**\[See Slide 10\]** It doesn\'t matter whether a teacher is certified.
You\'re going to have a lot of proposals about what kind of training
should teachers have, shouldn\'t we lower the standards, or avoid
certain kinds of standards in order to fill positions. This is a study
that looked at the achievement gains of students in mathematics, general
math and algebra, for those who had teachers who were certified in
mathematics, and those who were not certified in mathematics, and you
can see that there was a significantly higher gain for the students who
were taught by certified teachers, who had the content, background and
the background on how to teach that content to students. And the
differential is bigger as the mathematics becomes more difficult. So you
see a much bigger differential for algebra than you do for general math.
This is borne out in some other studies that have been done also in math
and science that it matters across the board, it really matters a lot in
higher level courses.

QUESTION: So the comparison group is people who neither have mathematics
nor teacher certification, or are they people of math but no teacher
certification?

DR. DARLING-HAMMOND: Some of this group were certified in other fields,
but did not have a background in mathematics, were not certified in
mathematics. And some were simply not prepared.

QUESTION: Didn\'t have a math background and no certification some
had\...

DR. DARLING-HAMMOND: Certification, but the wrong field. So the measure
is certified in mathematics as opposed to just certified in general.

# Qualifications of Teachers by School Type

So, it does matter, and it\'s an equity issue as much as it is a quality
issue. **\[See Slide 11\]** Over and over again we find, as you saw in
the video, that kids in high-minority, low-income schools are much more
likely to be taught by unqualified teachers, by large margins, and that
bears out over and over again. The odds of having a teacher who is
certified in the field for those who are in predominantly ‑‑ schools
that serve predominantly white students are much higher than for those
who serve predominantly minority students. The same thing with respect
to the licensing field.

The two studies I pointed to earlier found that in the case of effective
teachers with different levels of effectiveness, black students were
about half as likely to be assigned to the most effective teachers, and
about twice as likely to be assigned to the least effective teachers. In
the other study that I showed you, they found that if you held income
levels constant, almost all the differential in black and white students
achievement and test scores was a function of differences in the
qualifications of their teachers, because teachers are the most
unequally distributed educational resource.

The interesting thing about the New Haven/Oakland comparison, which
could be made across other districts, happened to be one that was
chosen, is that Oakland actually had more money for people than New
Haven. It\'s a higher spending district for lots of reasons. But they
spent a much smaller share of their budget on teachers\' salaries. And
so teachers in Oakland earned about a third lower, about 30 percent
less, than teachers in New Haven, because New Haven puts almost all of
its money into getting and keeping and supporting the teachers.

Emily Feistrizer found some years ago that about 38 percent of education
budgets in this country go to teachers\' salaries. We found in the
National Commission\'s work that in many other countries, like
Switzerland, Germany, Japan, and others, a much greater share of
personnel in school are teachers rather than non-teaching personnel, 60
to 80 percent, versus about 43 percent in this country. And,
furthermore, the share of the budget that goes to support teachers,
their salaries and their training, is substantially larger, almost
always well over 50 percent, and generally up in the neighborhood of
about 60 or 70 percent of the total budget.

So districts and states have decisions that they can make about how to
spend the education dollars that they have, how much of it goes into
bureaucracy, how much of it goes into the classroom, how much of it goes
into teachers, how much of it goes into personnel who sit around the
edges of the classroom. So, I think that\'s a part of the story as well.

Finally, because I want to keep to our time frame here, I won\'t review
the study that Secretary Riley mentioned, but I would be glad to go back
to it. We did find that the states that score ‑‑ this study looking at
controlling for poverty rates and language background of students, to
what extent are the NAEP scores of various states a function of various
factors. **\[See Slide 12\]** And we looked at the qualifications of
teachers as one of those. We found that the proportion of teachers with
full certification or major in the field was the strongest predictor by
far of how kids do across states. You know, the achievement distribution
in this country is extremely wide. The top scores in states like
Minnesota, Connecticut, North Dakota, and so on, score as well as
countries like Korea, and Singapore and Japan in mathematics. Bottom
scoring states like Louisiana and California, I'm sad to say now, score
about as well as places like Jordan, Nigeria, and Scotland. So, we had
that kind of differential. And, across the board of the qualifications
of teachers in those states are the strongest predictors of how well our
kids do. Much stronger predictors, actually, than average dollars or
class sizes.

**\[See Slide 13\]** Many people ask the question what matters more,
subject matter knowledge or teaching knowledge? You\'re going to be into
the conversation about what makes it possible to keep people. It turns
out that both matter a lot, and the solutions we look for should not try
to trade off one against another. This is from a study that looked at
the effects on teaching performance, teacher performance, of different
kinds of knowledge, basic skills, test scores, subject matter, test
scores, and performance in teacher education course work, both extent of
and performances, as indicators, as predictors of actual classroom
performance. And you can see that what the subject matter knowledge
mattered a lot across all these different indicators of teaching ranging
from things like instructional planning and classroom management, all
the way down to understanding of the subject. But knowledge of how to
teach mattered even more in terms of performance. It\'s possible to know
a lot about a subject and still have difficulty figuring out how to
convey that subject to other people unless you have strategies. It is
conversely very difficult if you know little about a subject to be able
to convey that information accurately.

So, both matter, and one of the things that we\'re beginning to discover
is that when people get good training in both areas, it makes an
enormous difference not only to their effectiveness in the classroom,
but also whether they\'re likely to enter and stay in teaching. There
have been a number of programs that have tried to create a five-year
programs of teacher education that included year-long student teaching
or internship assignments, often in a professional development school
for people who are organized to support teaching, and that experience,
in addition to a bachelor\'s degree in the field ‑‑ I\'m not saying that
a major is the best way to measure knowledge, you\'ll get into that
debate later in terms of what do you need to know to teach math well or
science well? But, these are people who have had a lot of subject
training. A bachelor\'s in the field plus a fifth year of practice
teaching in a high quality setting with good mentoring leads to course
work on teaching methods, child development, and so on, enter teaching
at much higher rates, and stay in teaching at much higher rates.

# Alternate Routes into Teaching

So, for example, **\[See Slide 14\]** we looked at a variety of studies
of different routes into teaching, and what they mean for retention in
teaching and, in fact, what the actual costs are, and what we found is
that for those folks who have been through these five-year program
models that have been a result of teacher education reform, 90 or more
percent enter teaching and about 85 percent are still there three years
later. In typical four-year undergraduate programs, that often have the
tension between time to learn about content and time to learn about
pedagogy, and do a lot of front loading of courses before there\'s a
little bit of student teaching at the end, only about 70 percent go into
teaching and of that cohort, about 50 percent are still there three
years later.

And of the very short-term alternative routes that have been created in
some states, and these data are based on data from the Dallas
Independent School District, the Houston Independent School District,
the Los Angeles Teacher Training Program, and a program called Teach For
America, which brings people in for a couple of years, the percentage
going in and then staying three years later is only about 30 percent. So
that while you\'re investing what looks like less in the training,
you\'re also reaping less over the long-term in terms of career level
teachers. So, it actually turns out to be more expensive to
under-prepare people, and then let them spin out again, than it is to
prepare people more effectively and keep them in the profession.

And I think it\'s one of the ‑‑ you will probably want to talk about
alternate routes into teaching, because it\'s a very important thing to
get mid-career folks into teaching. There are lots of good mid-career
opportunities for folks in math and science. There are some wonderful
programs that have been created that help people get access to teaching.
And we studied a number of them. **\[See Slide 15\]** I\'m going to
mention just a few of them here that we looked at in the Commission\'s
report that you may want to take a look at, at Colorado State
University, where they work particularly with folks from engineering,
chemistry, geology, and fields like that. California State\'s program at
Dominguez Hills, which is helped, created with help from the business
community to attract retiring aerospace engineers into teaching.
There\'s another one at George Washington University that\'s been
working for years with military personnel, they have very high rates of
success of putting people into teaching, helping them learn to teach in
an effective, efficient way, that streamlines the course work and the
internship experience for them, doesn\'t ask them to go back and start
over in a four-year program, and keeps them in the profession.

But, on the other hand, some of the strategies that have tried to get
people in with just a few weeks of training and then say, you\'re on
your own, God bless you, we\'ll see you in June, have had this kind of
revolving door effect. And I think it\'s a tragedy because so many of
the people who bought into those programs are so energetic,
enthusiastic, bright, and potentially capable that you don\'t want to
have the possibility that you\'ll lose folks from teaching by recruiting
them in without adequate support.

**\[See Slide 16\]** One of the statements that was made by a wonderful
recruit whom I have since had the opportunity to meet and talk to from
Teach For America, which has great people coming into teaching who are
really enthusiastic, I think explains what the dilemma is that folks
have been experiencing if they get into the classroom without enough
training. This young man, who went on to medical school after about a
year in the classroom, actually it was less than a year because he left
before the year was out, said, "I could maybe have done a bad job at a
suburban high school. I stood to do an awful job at a school where you
needed to have special skills. I just didn\'t ever know I needed them
before I went in. I felt like, okay, I did the workshops, I know
science, and I care about the kids. You know, I had the motivation to
help, but I didn\'t have the skill. It\'s sort of like wanting to fix
someone\'s car and not having any idea how to fix a car. I was
unequipped to deal with it, and I had no idea."

And I think that the complexity of teaching is very hard to appreciate
before you get in the classroom. How do you help kids who get to high
school, as I discovered when I started teaching English in high school,
who don't know yet how to read, how do you help kids who have had
misconceptions about a field, all of a sudden change the way they look
at it? How do you work with kids whose first language isn\'t English?
What do you do about the 20 percent who have learning disabilities who
are in every classroom now you have because of inclusion models? What
strategies do you use to think about the curriculum? How do you move
them from here to there? How do you differentiate for kids who are at
different levels?

So, I think that the bottom line story I would like to sort of suggest
is that the challenge of this committee is to think about supply and
demand in quality in a way that really makes the quality of the
preparation and support as integral to the task as the development of
incentives to boost up the supply of people coming in. We\'ve got to
help recruit people to come in, prepare them well enough to succeed, and
then really work to keep them there if we\'re going to solve the problem
in the long-run.

Thanks. And I\'ll take any questions.

(Applause.)

QUESTION: Certification differs among states as well as among
institutions that offer certification so certification really has to
certify the teacher and the student achievement is still not increasing.
We look at teacher education institutions and how those... are there
some institutions that do a better job than others with their teachers
going to certain schools and students...

DR. DARLING-HAMMOND: Gerry and I are not in collusion, but I skipped
this overhead because I was worried about the time. And we did, **\[See
Slide 17\]** we\'ve done some studies of teacher education programs that
produce graduates who are distinctively effective in the classroom from
the beginning of their years in teaching with diverse populations of
students. It\'s very easy to be good in a classroom with kids who teach
themselves well, who are already kind of preselected for their capacity
to learn. Some of the ones that we discovered that were particularly
effective when we looked -- these are not, this is not a universe, there
are great problems that are not up here, these happen to be ones that
were studied, not ones that represent the universe.

They include for elementary mathematics and science Bank Street College
in New York City, which offers a MAT program, in fact, 90 percent of
their students now are mid-career switchers. Some of them from Wall
Street and lawyers jobs, and other things looking for a way to make
their way into a satisfying career. The University of California at
Berkeley which has a very ‑‑ they work with the Lawrence Hall of
Science, and with other partners in their preparation program, Michigan
State University\'s five-year program. At the secondary level,
University of Virginia\'s math program \-- we didn\'t look at their
science program so I just don't have a warrant for them; a very fine
Teachers College\'s science program; Stanford\'s MATS in math and
science. And there are many, many others. But there are programs you
could look at.

What we discovered in looking across programs about **\[See Slide 18\]**
what separates the stronger ones from the less strong ones seems to be
that first they have real emphasis on grounding in what we call content
pedagogy, the content area and how to teach it. This is true of good
professional development as well. It\'s not generic. It\'s not five
steps to a perfect lesson. It\'s not, here\'s the way you\'re going to
do classroom management, it\'s five bullets, and you just try to
implement. It\'s how do you teach this concept in mathematics and this
content learning to kids at a certain level. It\'s very grounded in the
content and the pedagogy associated with that.

We found that they focus on curriculum development, not just how to
teach a topic, but how does it all fit together, how does it add up?
What order would you want to teach certain concepts in mathematics in
because one is a prerequisite to understanding the next one. That\'s a
curriculum framework that helps you to think about how it all adds up.

Some schools of education for years have not even focused on curriculum
development, it hasn\'t been in the teacher education program at all.
So, this is a difference in good programs.

Emphasis on learning and assessment, teachers are learning a lot about
how do people learn, because if you know how people learn, then you can
do a lot to figure out how to teach them effectively. Lots of emphasis
on assessment. Not just how do you evaluate what your kids have learned,
but also how you assess what they are learning and how they are learning
along the way. So, that\'s a big emphasis that used to be missing from
teacher education.

Teaching strategies that are really focused on diverse learners, not
assuming that everyone learns the same way, but being able to target
your strategies to kids who learn in different ways of connecting theory
and practice because the student teaching, and the methods, of course,
are happening at the same time, and are connected to each other. It\'s
not like you sit in a classroom and study in the abstract and then try
to remember everything for two years until you get your 10 weeks of
student teaching, and then you\'re supposed to like apply them. But that
it\'s wrapped up together, learning and doing at the same time.

And, finally, lots of attention to expert mentors, and much longer
clinical practice. We\'re talking 30 weeks, not eight to ten, and the
programs that really are producing teachers who are substantially more
effective.

QUESTION: Do you have any data in regard to the actual amount of time
where student teachers have field supervision by their professors, and
whether or not that correlates to any measures of success that they
have?

DR. DARLING-HAMMOND: There is data that has compared from the same
institution, graduates of four-year undergraduate programs and five-year
models, in which the four-year undergraduates have usually 12 or 15
weeks of student teaching, the five-year program graduates have a whole
year of student teaching, that find that those in the five-year program
are more successful from the first part of performance on the job.
There\'s not data that asks the question or shows whether 12 weeks is
better than eight, or 15 weeks is better than 12.

QUESTION: Actually, let me ask you a little bit more specific when they
take their however many weeks, how much actual times does the professor
teaching the course go in and observe that teacher teaching, do you have
any data on that, and is there any correlation to the time that the
professor has done the observation, not the teacher, not a teacher, but
the one who is responsible for evaluating that student? Do we know
anything about that?

DR. DARLING-HAMMOND: I, from my own work in teacher education, think it
probably does make a big difference. I don\'t know of any controlled
studies that have looked at that in a way that would give you a
quantitative finding. But, in fact, I think that when one of the things
about the professional development school models is that typically the
people who are teaching courses with the student teachers and the
cooperating teachers are typically working together much more closely.
And you have much more convergence of what\'s going on in the classroom
practice and what\'s going on in the university. But we don\'t have, you
know, controlled studies on that.

QUESTION: We\'ve had one other presentation this morning as you probably
know, Jim Stigler, and, trying to take away a message from both talks, I
would say that your emphasis as been more on the preparation as sort of
the key to success. Is that accurate?

DR. DARLING-HAMMOND: Well, I\'ve also done a lot of looking at the
professional development work, including Jim\'s work, and I think the
same principles hold across training in the two arenas.

QUESTION: His message was focus on teaching, not the teacher. And I
think you would be saying, focus on the teacher. I wouldn\'t say not on
the teaching, but focus on the teacher.

DR. DARLING-HAMMOND: Well, I was asked to talk about supply and demand,
so that puts your focus on the teacher for the moment. I think I
absolutely agree with Jim that you\'ve got to give people the tools once
they\'ve gotten in there to be able potentially to succeed. And it is
hard to make up for a lack of knowledge at the front end later on, no
matter how much professional development we might try to supply.

On the other hand, good teachers, if they\'re not in contexts that help
them develop their teaching, or potentially good teachers that are in
contexts that don't involve other teachers, may not end up being able to
produce the kind of learning they\'d like. And so, for lots of reasons,
including the opportunity for collegial discussions of teaching and
sharing, you know, ways to develop teaching, things like pupil load, and
class size, things like how much time do you have with the kids, things
like administrative support, all of which contribute to teaching along
with the kind of close attention.

Now, in good preservice programs as well as good professional programs
what you see people doing is looking at teaching, pulling it apart,
diagnosing it, talking about how would you present this concept, how
would you present that concept, and not just reading textbooks. So, this
attention to the details of teaching and how kids learn is present
across the board. And it\'s relatively rare, and needs a lot of
encouragement.

Have we exhausted you? You\'ve exhausted me.

(Applause and end of tape.)