Center for American Progress » Education

The Importance of Preschool and Child Care for Working Mothers

Sarah Jane Glynn, Jane Farrell, and Nancy Wu — Wed, 08 May 2013 12:59:55 +0000

SOURCE: AP/Cliff Owen

Pre-K teaching assistant Mirna Ayala, left, and teacher Laura Amling, right, work with their three-year-old students to draw an alphabet shape at Powell Elementary School in Washington.

Endnotes and citations are available in the PDF version of this issue brief.

In his 2013 State of the Union address, President Barack Obama made a historic pledge to provide universal, high-quality pre-K education to our nation’s children. He chose to make this one of his administration’s priorities with good reason: Early childhood education has myriad benefits, including better, more equitable long-term outcomes for children of divergent economic backgrounds. Moreover, investments in these programs help cultivate a future workforce, secure long-term economic competitiveness, and develop our nation’s future leaders. Universal high-quality pre-K and child care would also throw a much-needed raft to families across America that are struggling to stay afloat while footing costly child care bills, missing work to provide care, or sending their children—our nation’s future innovators and workforce—to low-quality care centers.

Why expanding pre-K access would benefit children and parents

Only 6 out of 10 kindergarten programs in America are open for full-day enrollees. Increased funding for Head Start and child care subsidies together can encourage extended hours to better accommodate parents’ work schedules.
Enabling more women to work by improving access to child care can help mitigate the gender wage gap and reduce a mother’s likelihood of going on public assistance.
Lower costs and increased access to child care can lead to a decrease in the number of women leaving employment and an increase in the rate of entering employment, enabling mothers to keep working when they want or need to do so.

In addition to the positive long-term impacts that high-quality preschool and child care have on children and the economy, these programs provide important benefits to working parents, especially working mothers. The prohibitively high costs of private child care and the dearth of quality, accessible public providers means that parents are often left to choose between the lesser of two evils: low-quality care or forgoing needed pay to stay at home and care for a child themselves.

In response to this urgent problem, President Obama has proposed to allocate $1.4 billion in 2014 to expand public child care services, $15 billion over the next decade to expand state home-visitation programs to America’s most vulnerable families, and $75 billion over the next decade to invest in expanding access to quality preschool. This funding would help millions of parents, especially mothers, across America better balance their work and caregiving responsibilities without putting their children’s well-being or their own jobs at risk.

What choices do working parents have?

Most families currently have three options for securing child care. First, parents can stay at home and care for their children themselves. But this is increasingly difficult, as most families now rely on two breadwinners to stay above water. Moreover, mothers are more likely than fathers to take time away from paid work to care for a child, which can exacerbate mothers’ lifetime earnings gap. Second, parents can pay for child care out of pocket. But this approach is very costly for families, eating up 35.9 percent of a low-income family’s monthly budget. The third option for families is to use federal- or state-funded child care, but access to any publicly funded program, let alone a high-quality program, is very limited. Nationwide, nearly three in four children are not enrolled in a federal or state-funded pre-K program.

Understanding the drawbacks, risks, and shortcomings of each of these options—and especially how these limited choices negatively impact families and working mothers— makes clear the need for increased investment in high-quality pre-K and child care. We explore each option in detail below.

Option 1: Stay at home

Fifty years ago suggesting that one parent stay at home and forgo paid employment to provide child care would have made plenty of sense both culturally and economically. This was largely because families could live comfortably on one breadwinner’s income and also because women had traditionally been relegated to the domestic sphere. But in the past 40 years, due to both social advances and economic changes, American families have undergone a dramatic change. Leaving the workforce to provide care today, even temporarily, carries real risks.

The majority of parents now work, regardless of the age of their children. Parents are workers and workers are parents, both out of necessity and preference: 70.5 percent of mothers are in the labor force, including 64.8 percent of mothers with a child under the age of 6. That’s in large part because many families in today’s economy rely on two incomes in order to pay the bills. In fact, the only married-couple families that have seen real income growth over the past 30 years are families where both parents work.

Given that the cost of child care may be nearly as large as one parent’s entire salary, a worker’s choice to leave the workforce or work part time so that his or her family doesn’t need to cover those costs may appear to be an economically rational decision. And while there are mothers who choose to stay home for other reasons, short-term economic pressures are often part of the equation. But this choice is not without consequences.

Women are more likely than men to cut back their work hours or leave work entirely to care for their children. Unfortunately, this puts them at an economic disadvantage in the long run. Leaving the workforce, even for less than a year, can have long-term negative consequences for women’s careers and lifetime earnings.

The fact that women are more likely to take time out of the workforce to provide unpaid care for their children is part of the reason why there is a persistent gender wage gap in this country—10.5 percent of the differences in men’s and women’s earnings can be attributed to labor-force experience. When women work less, they pay less into Social Security over a shorter period of time, which is one of the reasons why retired women are more likely to live in poverty than retired men.

Access to child care is essential to a woman’s ability to participate in the workforce, and a lack of access to child care affects the work-family balance of both women and men. Women need to have the ability to make the choices that are best for them and their families in both the short and long term, and greater national investments in child care and preschool programs could help remove some of the constraints that may push mothers toward decisions that have negative economic consequences for them and their families down the road. It would make quality care more affordable for American families and support mothers’ employment.

Option 2: Pay for it out of pocket

Using part of a family’s total income is a second but equally problematic option for securing child care. In recent years the costs of care have skyrocketed, placing a disproportionate burden on families’ budgets. The fact is, for millions of families across the United States, paying for high-quality private child care is an economic impossibility.

In almost half of all states, the cost of child care exceeds the average rent payment, meaning that too many families with young children end up struggling to make ends meet. In 2011, the latest year for which data are available, the average family with a working mother and a child under age 5 that made child care payments spent nearly 10 percent of its total family income on child care. While that may not sound like an overwhelming burden, it ends up amounting to nearly a quarter—22.5 percent—of married mothers’ earnings, and more than a quarter—26.1 percent—of never-married mothers’ incomes. (see Table 1)

The costs of child care are even more extreme for younger mothers. The average age when mother’s first give birth in the United States is 25.7 years, meaning that half of new mothers are under the age of 26 when they have their first child. Not surprisingly, younger mothers tend to have lower incomes: By virtue of their age, they have less job tenure and are more likely than older mothers to still be completing their education. But this means that mothers under age 25 with a young child who are paying for child care end up spending a staggering one-third—33 percent—of their income on care because they typically earn less. (see Table 1) It is critical that these women have the opportunity to finish their education and gain job experience, but child care expenses can make that a daunting prospect.

The story becomes even bleaker for mothers who are living below the poverty line. As Table 1 shows, 26 percent of working mothers in poverty pay for child care out of pocket, and those expenses eat up nearly half—42.6 percent—of their monthly wages. It is vital that these women have work support, since they are more likely to be single parents and since seeking paid employment is required to have access to certain governmental benefits. Employment is also an important pathway into the middle class, but when child care is as expensive as it is, it places a disproportionate burden on the mothers who can least afford it.

While paying for child care out of pocket may be simple and affordable for wealthy families, it is not truly an option for many Americans, especially young single mothers.

Option 3: Utilize publicly funded and subsidized programs

A final option for accessing child care is utilizing programs funded or subsidized by states and the federal government. Unfortunately, while it may seem as though this must be a viable option for families who do not want to lose a co-breadwinner’s earnings or for those who can’t afford private care, the United States still has a long way to go on this front.

Only about 22 percent of children in low-income families currently receive federally subsidized child care, and while preschool enrollment has increased nationwide in recent years, the lowest-income children are the least likely to participate in preschool programs. Twenty-eight percent of 4-year-olds were enrolled in state-funded pre-K programs, and only 4 percent of 3-year-olds were similarly enrolled. Forty percent are not enrolled in any pre-K program at all. Clearly, the publicly funded services that are available are lacking, insufficient, or both.

Publicly funded programs are helpful for some low-income families and mothers, but access is too limited and quality is often far too low. Unless we expand and strengthen these programs, they will continue to not be a viable option for many working parents.

Lack of affordable care holds mothers back

There is a great deal of empirical evidence that shows how higher child care costs have a negative impact on mothers’ employment. Mothers are more likely to leave employment and less likely to start new jobs when the costs of child care are high. It is also difficult for parents to keep their jobs when they do not have access to consistent quality child care. A study conducted by Jeffrey D. Lyons in North Carolina found that about one in four families who were on a waitlist for child care assistance either lost or had to quit their jobs while they waited for an opening.

A similar study in New York City found that more than a third of families on the child care assistance waitlist either lost jobs or were unable to work, and one in five had either missed or been late for work because of their child care problems. Perhaps even more alarmingly, a quarter of families on a child care waitlist in Minnesota had to rely on public assistance in order to make ends meet while waiting to access child care subsidies.

This data was all collected before the recession, and since jobs are even scarcer now and family budgets stretched even thinner, there is reason to suspect that the current situation is worse than what these numbers portray.

Evidence from other countries shows that child care subsidies increase women’s labor force participation, help them obtain more stable jobs, and increase their income. While interventions in the United States have been much more modest by international standards, there is ample evidence showing that child care assistance helps working moms. Families who receive child care support are more likely to be employed and have longer employment spells that families who do not receive support. The effects are particularly strong for single mothers, who are nearly 40 percent more likely to maintain employment over two years than those who do not have help paying for child care.

Conclusion

The benefits of high-quality pre-K and child care are enormous. It is an essential way to close the achievement gap between children of different economic backgrounds and prepare them for kindergarten, primary school, and beyond. Decades of research have also shown that investing in our children at an early age pays social, educational, and economic dividends over the course of a child’s lifetime. Children deserve access to affordable high-quality education that promotes school readiness, regardless of their family situation.

We shouldn’t forget that affordable high-quality child care is also essential to parents’ abilities to balance work success with family responsibilities—a goal that every parent deserves to easily achieve. President Obama’s preschool and child care plan will strengthen families and make them more economically secure while also reducing inequality and improving educational achievement in this country.

Sarah Jane Glynn is a Senior Policy Analyst at the Center for American Progress. Jane Farrell is a Research Assistant for Economic Policy at the Center. Nancy Wu is an intern on the Economic Policy team at the Center.

President Obama’s Budget Makes Historic Investments in Young Children

Melissa Lazarín and Sasha Post — Wed, 10 Apr 2013 18:28:43 +0000

SOURCE: AP/ John Bazemore

President Barack Obama gestures as he speaks at the Decatur Recreation Center in Decatur, Georgia, about his plans for early childhood education. On April 10, 2013, President Obama called for significant investment in pre-school education in his fiscal 2014 proposed budget.

Two months ago in his State of the Union address, President Barack Obama pledged to dramatically expand access to high-quality preschool. Today in his fiscal year 2014 budget proposal, the president made good on this pledge by calling for a bold new $75 billion investment in preschool over 10 years. This investment would significantly shrink the preschool-access gap by helping states establish and expand high-quality programs.

The president’s budget also includes important investments to support the nation’s youngest children and working parents, including $1.4 billion in FY 2014 to expand high-quality child care for infants and toddlers and $15 billion over 10 years to expand states’ home-visiting programs for at-risk families.

Some might be skeptical of the federal government’s role in expanding preschool. But today’s budget makes clear that the president’s preschool plan is a true state-federal partnership. The president’s plan will help states grow their own preschool programs—an effort that is already well underway in many states. Thirty-nine states have already established state-funded preschool programs, and Mississippi is now poised to join their ranks.

At the state level preschool is not a partisan issue. Red states such as Oklahoma and Georgia are among the leaders in enrolling 4-year-olds in preschool, and Republican leaders in states such as Mississippi, Alabama, and Michigan are also working to invest more in preschool.

Under the president’s plan, states will be eligible to receive new federal dollars in return for investing their own dollars. And while the federal government will ensure that state programs meet high quality standards, states will continue to run their own programs. This state-federal partnership would cover all 4-year-olds from low- and moderate-income families at or below 200 percent of the poverty line. In addition, the new federal resources would free up state dollars to reach 3-year-olds and children from higher-income families and to provide full-day kindergarten.

We’ve known for many years that preschool can provide children with enormous lifelong benefits. But mounting evidence now shows that large-scale programs in states such as Oklahoma and Texas are highly effective. Research suggests that while low-income children and English language learners usually reap the greatest benefits from attending preschool, higher-income children receive substantial benefits as well.

Critics will argue that we cannot afford to make these new investments in the current fiscal climate. But studies show that investing in preschool will pay for itself by increasing future tax revenues and decreasing future spending obligations.

In addition, the president’s budget fully offsets the cost of his preschool plan by increasing the tax on cigarettes and other tobacco products by 94 cents. This has the added benefit of promoting a healthier population and reducing the number of kids who take up smoking.

State leaders throughout the country are working across party lines to invest in young children. Congress should follow suit.

Melissa Lazarín is the Director of Education Policy at the Center. Sasha Post is Special Advisor to CAP President and CEO Neera Tanden.

Getting the Best People into the Toughest Jobs

Allan Odden — Thu, 04 Apr 2013 13:03:43 +0000

SOURCE: AP/Andy King

Erin Gavin, a Teach For America teacher, listens to students during a group discussion with seventh-graders at a Brooklyn Center School in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota, February 4, 2011.

Endnotes and citations are available in the PDF version of this report.

It is indisputable that teachers and principals have the greatest impact on student learning. Unfortunately, the education system has hired and tenured thousands of ineffective teachers and principals, particularly in high-poverty urban and rural schools. As a consequence, these schools have low levels of student learning.

To remedy this problem, the nation is engaged in multiple activities to get effective teachers into all classrooms and effective principals into all schools through more “strategic management” of education talent. Strategic talent management is an approach that manages all human resource programs—recruitment, selection, placement, development, evaluation, tenure, promotion, dismissal, and compensation—around a set of effectiveness metrics that capture instructional practice and student-learning growth. The theory is that effective principals should manage schools in ways that facilitate teachers’ acquiring the instructional expertise they need to make them and the school effective—that is to say, successful in dramatically boosting student learning.

The issue of strategic talent management in education leapt onto the policy and practice agenda quite recently. Yet in a short time period, huge changes in policy and practice have occurred. From a set of disjointed policies and even-worse practices, a comprehensive and holistic view of strategic talent management in education is developing, supported by new and ambitious federal and state policies and rapidly changing local practices. Admittedly, policy design still needs significant calibration, and local implementation is far from complete. But the landscape of how teachers and principals—the education talent—are managed is dramatically changing. A once-haphazard mix of approaches is moving toward many more strategic systems that are designed to ensure that only effective teachers and principals are recruited, tenured, retained, and well-compensated—particularly in urban and poor rural communities.

This paper examines the evolving landscape of talent management in education, which is broken out in five sections:

Section one: Talent management, or lack thereof, in education at the close of the 20th century
Section two: Educational change that began at the dawn of the 21st century
Section three: Rumblings of change that evolved into comprehensive new federal and state human-capital management policies and local practices
Section four: Rumblings of change that coalesced into a foundation of change across the country and the new world of talent management
Section five: Why the focus on talent evolved and quickly assumed such a prominent role in the nation’s education policy and practice agendas

In part, due to positive state and local response to federal requirements for new education programs such as Race to the Top, School Improvement Grants, the Teacher Incentive Fund, and No Child Left Behind waivers, states and districts are identifying and using new channels for recruiting better talent into the nation’s schools, especially high-poverty schools in urban and rural areas. States and school districts are also developing new ways of evaluating teachers—methods that use a measure of instructional practice and evidence of student learning, and in some cases student surveys on the academic environment. States and districts are then using these new metrics to determine whether or not to tenure teachers, as a condition for promotion, to implement new salary schedules, and for dismissal—instead of seniority.

Though there is steady progress toward designing and implementing all these new policies and practices across the country, there is also opposition, and the road forward will certainly be bumpy. To be successful, these initiatives need to also solve some major challenges such as making the new evaluation systems affordable; ensuring that the scores that teachers receive on their evaluations derive from “cut” scores that are set at rigorous levels in order to accurately identify the most effective and most ineffective teachers; deciding where to put the toughest requirements for entering the teaching professions so the talent that flows from the new recruitment sources are not shut off; and embedding all this in an effective school improvement strategy that is linked to the new Common Core State Standards Initiative.

At the foundation of every one of these reforms is an acknowledgement across policy communities and shared by a growing number of advocates on the ground that talent truly matters. In spite of the continuing need to improve curriculum rigor, fund education appropriately, provide quality development and support to teachers, and improve parental support, the undeniable fact remains: There are too few smart and capable people staffing the most challenging schools—people who will work relentlessly to ensure that all students learn. This factor is the impetus for the rapidly changing landscape of human-capital management that is impacting all stages of the educator pipeline.

Among the recommendations we offer is making entry to the profession difficult at every point to ensure that only the top talent meets the entry standards—based on rigorous assessments of content knowledge and by implementing a rigor ous “bar exam,” which should assess both instructional expertise and impact on student learning—for the full professional license to be required of every novice teacher at some point after three to five years of teaching. This approach supports both traditional and alternative pathways into the profession, while also ensuring that only demonstrably effective teachers earn the full professional license and then tenure—whatever their pathway into the profession.

Allan Odden is the director of Strategic Management of Human Capital, professor emeritus of educational leadership and policy analysis at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and co-director of the Consortium for Policy Research in Education.

The New College Scorecard Is a Much-Needed Improvement

Julie Margetta Morgan — Thu, 14 Feb 2013 16:09:11 +0000

SOURCE: AP/ Stephen Morton

Savannah Country Day School student Frances Dales, left, and Director of College Counseling Mary Beth Fry, right, discuss Dales' college options.

Creating a one-size-fits-all fact sheet to help families choose among the multitude of colleges in the United States is not an easy task. We commend the White House and the Department of Education’s efforts to do just that by redesigning the college scorecard—a one-page summary of the cost, debt, and earnings potential of every degree-granting college in the United States. The scorecard—announced by President Barack Obama in his State of the Union address this week and released yesterday—addresses many of the concerns we raised about last year’s draft scorecard in our report, “Improving the College Scorecard.”

CAP brought the original college scorecard draft to focus groups with college-bound high school students, who identified potential problems with its design and content. The new scorecard responds to these students’ concerns in the following areas:

Better layout. We asked for a more readable design, and the Department of Education delivered. The new college scorecard features easy-to-read, clearly labeled sections with simple graphics that give students an idea of how an institution measures up to other colleges nationwide. In addition, this scorecard contains a plain-language description of net price—a college’s tuition minus any discounts such as grants and scholarships, which totals what a student actually pays to attend any particular school—a concept that was particularly troublesome for some students.
Customization. CAP found that students want to know what they specifically will pay to attend a particular college, not what the average student will pay. The new scorecard contains a link to the college’s net price calculator, which allows them to get a price estimate by entering information on each family’s particular financial circumstances.
Alternative measures of debt. The original college scorecard draft measured student debt as “the percentage of total loan amounts being repaid by former students,” a concept that the students we spoke with found difficult to understand. The new college scorecard replaces that measure with student loan default rates and median student loan debt for each college. While the results of our focus groups did not support inclusion of default rates, they found that students responded very well to information about average loan debt. In particular, we recommended that loan debt be put in the context of students’ lives by including information such as average monthly payments for each institution. The new scorecard prominently features that information.
Working toward better employment data. Our report emphasized students’ interest in employment outcomes—including average earnings, as well as employment rates and earnings by major. Though the scorecard does not currently include this information, the Department of Education plans to release earnings information this year, and the scorecard encourages students to seek detailed employment outcome information from the universities themselves.

Of course, there are still some areas for improvement. As the Department of Education makes changes to the scorecard over the coming year, we urge it to consider:

Including institutional contact information. The college scorecard will never be able to answer everything—it may inspire more questions than it answers. So it is important to include the contact information for relevant offices at the college or university such as admissions and financial aid offices.
Consumer testing. CAP’s focus groups were limited both in terms of scope and type of student. The Department of Education should continue testing the scorecard with students, especially nontraditional ones such as older adults and part-time students. It should also conduct focus groups with parents to gauge their reactions to the scorecard. In particular, the department should test whether both students and parents can easily understand the language included in the new draft, and whether the new graphics convey the appropriate messages.
Collecting data specifically for the scorecard. The information presented in the scorecard is limited to the data currently available to the Department of Education. That’s why policymakers are likely to include in it information such as default rates, even though our focus groups show that most students will not use these data to inform their decisions. To improve the usability and relevance of the scorecard, the department should collect new data based on what families want to know and can easily incorporate into their college decisions.
Finding ways to get the scorecard into students’ hands. The new version of the college scorecard is currently only available on federal websites. The Department of Education should work with Congress and college access advocates to find ways to put the scorecard in places where students are more likely to find it, starting with the places students already go for college information: high school guidance counselors’ offices and college websites.

CAP shares the president’s goal of helping students find quality, affordable postsecondary institutions. Access to easy-to-understand, comparable information about the value of a college’s programs will help families make sound choices about where to apply and how to pay for college. The new college scorecard is a significant step in that direction.

Julie Margetta Morgan is the Director of Postsecondary Access and Success at the Center for American Progress.

Using Multiple Evaluation Measures to Improve Teacher Effectiveness

Glenda L. Partee — Tue, 18 Dec 2012 14:00:30 +0000

SOURCE: iStockphoto

Determining what evidence best reflects teacher effectiveness and how this information can be used to improve the quality of teaching are among the significant issues facing public education today.

Endnotes and citations are available in the PDF version of this report.

Consensus is elusive when it comes to figuring out exactly what it takes to improve our nation’s public schools. When the quest is to ensure that our children achieve academically, there just aren’t many certainties. Except one: The quality of teaching matters.

Research shows that an effective teacher is key to student success. But determining what evidence best reflects teacher effectiveness and how this information can be used to improve the quality of teaching are among the significant issues facing public education today.

The impetus for meaningful teacher evaluation reform from many sectors set the stage for the major changes we are now witnessing in the direction and scope of teacher performance evaluation. Some of the factors leading to this reform include:

The 2009 seminal report, “The Widget Effect,” exposed the reigning indifference to instructional effectiveness in our schools and in our policies—an indifference that ignores variations in the effectiveness of our teachers, treating them as if they were all the same, and that does little to address the problem.
Advocates are decrying the lack of state guidance and requirements for teacher evaluations. For too many school and district leaders, formal evaluation is a compliance activity instead of an opportunity to provide meaningful feedback to teachers for improvement.
Academics pronounce that the state of teacher performance evaluation is a nonsystem in need of major reform.
Many sectors—governors and mayors of different political parties, state legislatures, businesses, and educators and their unions—are calling for meaningful reforms in the way we evaluate and support our teachers.

Dynamic reforms effecting teacher evaluation and support are now happening in states and school districts. These reforms are inspired in part by the U.S. Department of Education’s competitive grant programs, including Race to the Top, which require new standards and assessments in our public schools, data systems capable of measuring student growth, and human capital systems designed to recruit, develop, and retain effective teachers. This effort is matched by recent priorities of the Teacher Incentive Fund supporting district-wide evaluation systems that reward teacher success. The Education Department’s decision to provide waivers from key provisions of or flexibility within the Elementary and Secondary Education Act—also known as No Child Left Behind—offers a further boost and a framework for states to make these long overdue reforms in a coherent way.

On February 28, 2012, 26 states and the District of Columbia submitted requests to the Department of Education for waivers. Twenty-three states were ultimately approved; two states (Idaho and Illinois) have pending applications; one state (Vermont) withdrew; and one state (Iowa) was rejected. (Note: Idaho’s application was approved on October 17, 2012, while this paper was drafted and is therefore not a part of this analysis.) Eleven other states received waiver approvals in an earlier round. As part of the second round of requests, all states presented plans to raise standards, improve accountability, and support reforms to improve principal and teacher effectiveness. These plans provide an important view into the decisions and actions of states as they design, build on, or perfect the systems for these new reforms.

Many states are now actively building or implementing educator workforce systems with meaningful evaluation and support systems that are linked to improvements in classroom practices and student achievement. No longer is teacher evaluation expected to be merely perfunctory or used exclusively as the basis of personnel decisions. State leaders are rethinking the underlying assumptions and policies of teacher evaluation systems and, together with critical stakeholders, are planning the implementation of new systems.

The focus of this report is on one piece of this very large set of transformations: the multiple measures and multiple methods used in new teacher evaluation systems, including the weighting of these measures, to determine a composite score of teacher effectiveness. The data source for our analysis is the plans of 23 second-round waiver applicants approved by the U.S. Department of Education as of August 2012. These include the plans received and approved for Arizona, Arkansas, Connecticut, Delaware, the District of Columbia, Kansas, Louisiana, Maryland, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Nevada, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oregon, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Utah, Virginia, Washington, and Wisconsin.

Our review of these various reform plans indicates that the design and implementation of new systems of evaluation and support are truly works in progress. It’s clear that this work will be an iterative process and that it should be open to review

and adjustment as new research and the results of pilot implementations surface. For now, the state efforts and the waiver process both represent a rich laboratory of exploration and reform that bears watching for lessons to be learned, as well as for necessary corrections to be made. A few findings have already emerged from this initial review. They include the following:

This is hard work that is being approached differently by states while they implement multiple reforms.

It is difficult to legislate, regulate, and provide guidance for change within an environment of multiple simultaneous reforms. These reforms include the implementation of new college and career-ready standards, statewide data systems, new assessments, and new state responsibilities for these new systems, to name a few. The new educator evaluation systems must align with and be a part of these other reforms.
Each state approach, including that of the District of Columbia, is different, and each is at a different stage of development and implementation. Evaluation designs are influenced by factors such as the characteristics of local school districts, laws governing charter school autonomy, and a state’s history for local control and collective bargaining agreements related to educator evaluation.

Measures used to assess educator effectiveness are diverse and cannot be captured by only one or two indicators.

Waiver winners rely on a range of measures and methods for assessing teacher professional practice, including classroom observations, self-assessments and reflection, teaching artifacts, student-learning measures, and surveys of students and parents.
States are using both student-achievement measures (measures of student learning at a specific point in time) and growth measures (changes in student learning over time), including value-added estimates based on state assessments when available, to capture measures of student success aligned with individual teachers or teams of teachers. Some states are still considering the types of student-growth measures to use, and some are piloting multiple models before recommending a particular approach.
States are also looking to more personalized and school-appropriate measures for determining teacher impact on student learning and vesting teachers more directly in monitoring student progress through approaches such as student-achievement goal setting, student-learning objectives, student-learning targets, teacher goal setting, and unit work samples. These measures are used to actively engage the teacher and the evaluator in a goal-setting process for student learning that is customized for the teaching assignment and for the students.
States give different weights to component measures devoted to indicators of student achievement and indicators of professional practice; they also rely on different measures. Some states have specific percentages of components spelled out in state law. Others do not. In some cases a certain amount of discretion is given to local districts for insertion of components they value in the evaluation.

States are expanding the measures used to determine teacher effectiveness for nontested grades and subjects.

Though some states are in the beginning stages, all are determining or developing assessments applicable to teachers of grades and subjects that are not part of statewide, standardized assessments for the purpose of determining student growth.
Typically this involves expanding the portfolio of state assessments to provide growth data in all grades and subjects or expanding the portfolio of nationally or locally approved assessment tools that can be validly used such as classroom-based assessments, unit tests, end-of-course assessments, student-learning objectives, and portfolios.

Systems have diverse purposes.

Waiver applicants were responsive to the application requirements making these systems as much about differentiating educators on their levels of effectiveness and for use in making personnel decisions as about using the evaluation process to identify areas for overall educator improvement.

Successful systems need an infrastructure of support.

The work of the states is not just about creating new systems of teacher evaluation, but also about putting an infrastructure in place to ensure the success of these systems. This means that teachers and principals must receive orientation to the new systems; evaluators must receive appropriate training (for example, in collecting evidence, rating against a professional standard, and providing feedback); rubrics and protocols for observation must be identified and tested; strong teacher-student data links must be in place that verify that the teacher of record is tied to the right students for purposes of assessing teacher impact; and management systems must be devised that allow teachers to track their progress toward learning goals. Just as importantly, supports and interventions must be in place to move teachers toward higher levels of effectiveness in line with the information provided through evaluation.

Against this evolving backdrop we offer the following policy recommendations:

The U.S. Department of Education should closely monitor the successes and problems experienced by these states and the District of Columbia as they implement these new systems of evaluation and support them going forward.
The states and the District of Columbia should continue to heed emerging findings from research and evaluation and seek feedback from their own efforts to ensure continuous improvements.
The U.S. Department of Education and philanthropic organizations should continue to support improvements in the tools and infrastructure necessary for the development and sustainability of these new evaluation systems.
Lessons learned from these efforts must inform the future direction of education reform through the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act.

Glenda L. Partee is the Associate Director for Teacher Quality at the Center for American Progress.