The Classroom: It’s Where the Action Is, by Elizabeth Covay Minor, Laura Desimone, Kristie J. R. Phillips, and Kailey Spencer
We are currently in an era of intense focus on teacher evaluation, teacher accountability, and teacher value-added as means to reduce racial and socioeconomic status achievement gaps. Although the outcome of teacher effectiveness is important, we should also be emphasizing what is occurring in the classroom that theoretically leads to measures of effectiveness–teaching. In other words, we are focusing on the destination with less attention being paid to the road to get us there. After all, it is the action within the classroom which is most closely related to student learning opportunities, and as such we should take a closer look at differences that exist within the classroom. Because of the central role of the classroom in differential student learning opportunities, we examine the extent of racial and socioeconomic status differences in instruction as well as teacher characteristics.
The common assumption is that poor and minority students have teachers of poorer quality and receive poorer quality instruction. We test these commonly held assumptions using a large national database—the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Kindergarten Cohort of 1998. The results of our examination were recently published in the American Journal of Education in an article, “A New Look at the Opportunity to Learn Gap across Race and Income.”
In our article, we argue that in order to understand the achievement gap, we need to first understand the differences in student learning opportunities. These opportunities to learn are related to both the characteristics of the teachers themselves and to the instruction that teachers are delivering within the classroom. If there are systematic differences by student background in teacher characteristics and instruction, this would constitute an opportunity to learn gap. More specifically in our research, we focused on opportunity to learn gaps based in race and socioeconomic status in elementary math classrooms.
As much of the past research suggests and is commonly assumed, we found that black students and students from families of lower socioeconomic status tend to have teachers with less experience, who are less likely to have advanced degrees, and who are less likely to have taken a normal route to certification. However, there were few differences in teacher reports of the amount of math methods courses that they have taken. This lack of difference in math methods courses is likely related to the structure of teacher preparation programs. So, though there are not large differences in the extent to which math teachers were exposed to mathematics content in their coursework, we found race and income gaps in access to teachers with higher levels of credentials and experience.
When examining differences in instruction, we found some unexpected differences or lack of differences. Since there are black-white and socioeconomic status achievement gaps, we expected there to be large differences in terms of the content that teachers are teaching. However, this was not the case. We found that, substantively, there are not large differences in student exposure to math topics such as numbers and operations; place values and fractions; measurement, shapes, and geometry; data, statistics, and algebra; and estimation. However, this does not imply the absence of significant differences in the quality of how that content is presented to the students, which is likely an important aspect of the effectiveness of learning opportunities.
We did find significant gaps in the amount of math homework that teachers expect of their students. Black students are consistently expected to spend more time on math homework than white students. This could be for many reasons. For example, it could be that teachers of black students tend to assign more homework. On the other hand, it may be that teachers expect that it will take black students longer to do their homework. Evidence to support this interpretation is present in some of our other research in which we find that teachers tend to perceive black students to have lower ability than white students despite having similar test scores. Based on the available data for this study, we are unable to know why the teachers of black students expect them to do more homework, or determine the nature or quality of the homework students are assigned. Despite this limitation, the finding that there are differences is likely an important indicator of a gap in student opportunities to learn.
Not only are we in an era of teacher evaluation but also of student testing, and in our study we found that there are significant gaps in the amount of testing that occurs within the classroom. Black students from families of lower socioeconomic status tend to be tested more than both their same race peers and white students. As with our homework finding, in this study we do not examine whether more frequent testing is good or bad, which likely depends on the purpose and quality of the tests. Instead, we aim to highlight gaps in the teaching practices experienced by students from different backgrounds.
Through our study, we found that there are expected and unexpected gaps based in student race and income in student opportunities to learn. The goal of this particular study was to identify these differences before exploring how these differences may explain achievement gaps. Our findings suggest that, in addition to focusing on outcome measures of teacher effectiveness, it is important to examine the practice of teaching as it occurs in the classroom. By having a better understanding of what learning opportunities are occurring within the classroom, and how that differs by student background, we can make changes within the class. Teacher evaluations can and should focus on how teachers can change or improve instruction to provide all students with more opportunities to learn. By changing the focus in this way, we may be able to use teacher evaluations to better help develop teachers and reduce achievement gaps.
Article, “A New Look at the Opportunity-to-Learn Gap across Race and Income”, featured in the American Journal of Education http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.1086/679392?uid=3739808&uid=2&uid=4&uid=3739256&sid=21105561464241
