Wide variation in educational quality in U.S.

The U.S. approach to education is a command-and-control style, using standardized tests that become the object of the educational process. This study provides more evidence that it isn’t working.

Most American first-grade classrooms are pretty happy places to be. Children smile and enjoy working with one another and have positive interactions with their teachers who recognize their students’ cues for help and offer timely responses.

But that doesn’t mean all students are getting the academic content they need, according to a new study being published by two University of Virginia researchers in a recent issue of The Elementary School Journal.

Robert Pianta, dean of the University of Virginia’s Curry School of Education and director of its Center for Advanced Study of Teaching and Learning, and Megan Stuhlman, a senior research scientist at the center, based their study on data collected from direct observations of 820 first-grade classrooms in nearly 700 private and public schools in 32 states.

Trained raters used scoring guidelines to assess the types and frequency of social and instructional interactions between teachers and students. A teacher ignoring a student with a question would score low on “sensitivity,” while a teacher who responded quickly would score high.

Based upon those observations, Pianta and Stuhlman grouped the classrooms into four major categories. Teachers who worked to both create a positive social climate and strong instructional support – 23 percent of classrooms – were given the score of “high overall quality.”

Twenty-eight percent of classrooms had teachers scoring just below the mean and were thus deemed “mediocre.” Seventeen percent of the classrooms were “low overall quality.”

The largest category, accounting for 31 percent of the classrooms, was labeled “positive emotional climate, low academic demand.”

Stuhlman explained that in these classrooms, teachers interacted warmly with the students and did not discipline with threats. However, “low academic demand” was revealed in their tendency to not give constructive feedback.

“We found that quality, particularly instructional features of teacher behavior, was rather low across the sample,” said Pianta, the study’s lead investigator.

“In other studies, we have demonstrated the connection between these teacher-child interactions and student learning gains. So what we are seeing here may influence the extent to which children can perform at standards consistent with accountability frameworks such as No Child Left Behind.”

Part of a 17-year longitudinal study funded by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, this study sought to identify factors that measure teacher quality based on the evidence in the data collected from the large classroom sample.

Interestingly, the study found factors traditionally thought to influence quality, such as class size and teacher credentials, had little influence on classroom quality. Instead, the study found that high classroom quality is linked more strongly to teachers who are both creating a positive social climate and offering strong instructional support.

“To increase the chances that more children will receive a high-quality education, we have to provide teachers with effective and targeted support to help them promote their students’ learning and understanding,” Pianta said.