On “Access to Teacher Quality” as the New Equity Concern

Posted on July 2, 2014
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A short while back, the Center for American Progress posted their take-away from the Vergara decision. That takeaway was that equity of teacher quality distribution is the new major concern, or as they framed it Access to Effective Teaching. Certainly, the distribution of teaching quality is important. But let me set the record straight on a few major issues I have with this claim.
First, this is not new. It is relatively standard in the context of state constitutional litigation over equity and adequacy of educational resources to focus on the distributions of programs and services, as well as student outcomes, AND TEACHER ATTRIBUTES!
I (and many others) have regularly addressed these issues in reports and on the witness stand for years. It is important to understand that school finance equity litigation as it is often identified, actually tends these days to focus more broadly on equity and adequacy of educational programs and services, including teacher characteristics, and their relation to inequities and inadequacies of funding.
Second, modern measures of effective teaching, as I have explained in a previous post, are very problematic for evaluating “equity.” teacher effectiveness which have a tendency to be associated with demographic context and for that matter access to resources. To review, as I’ve explained numerous previous times, growth percentile and value added measures contain 3 basic types of variation:
  1. Variation that might actually be linked to practices of the teacher in the classroom;
  2. Variation that is caused by other factors not fully accounted for among the students, classroom setting, school and beyond;
  3. Variation that is, well, complete freakin statistical noise (in many cases, generated by the persistent rescaling and stretching, cutting and compressing, then stretching again, On “Access to Teacher Quality” as the New Equity Concern | School Finance 101: