University Times

Virtually everyone agrees that America’s public school system is failing and in need of reform. But most conventional solutions are misguided or inadequate, according to a Pitt expert in organizational research.

Recent survey data indicate that two-thirds of Americans believe that the public school system is in crisis, said Carrie Leana March 24, on the occasion of her formal installation by Provost Patricia Beeson as the George H. Love Professor of Organizations and Management in the Katz Graduate School of Business.

Carrie Leana

Three out of 10 students do not finish high school with their cohort, including nearly half of African Americans and Hispanic students, noted Leana, who also is director of Pitt’s Center for Health and Care Work; holds secondary appointments in the School of Medicine and the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, and is an associate at the Learning Research and Development Center.

There are severe deficiencies in learning, particularly in mathematics and science, with, for example, fewer than 40 percent of 4th graders achieving at their expected grade level in math, Leana said.

Other problems include teacher stress and low morale, which are compounded by bad publicity and clamors for regular oversight and accountability standards, as well as high teacher turnover. In New York City elementary schools, for example, the teacher turnover rate is about 20 percent per year, and as much as 30 percent in the schools with primarily lower-income kids.

The macro-level problem is one that cuts across American society, Leana said. “Clearly, poverty explains student performance more than anything else. If we want to reform public education, we should ask: Just how much do we really want to do something about poverty?” she maintained.

“But what happens once the kids come to school? What processes can help student achievement and performance? What kinds of things, what teacher attributes improve student performance?”

Leana cited research from her five-year study of 199 New York City elementary schools. The study looked at more than 1,000 teachers and some 24,000 K-5 school children’s math achievement ranges, in a talk titled “Organizational Theory and Public School Reform: The Role of Teacher Human and Social Capital.”

“The conventional wisdom for improving public education is to focus on the individual teacher, in other words to improve the human capital of teachers,” Leana said. In addition, there are calls to bring in more outsiders — specialists or master teachers to advise educators — and there are politicians advocating the abolition of teacher tenure. There also has been a focus on improving curriculum, with minimal impact.

“What’s implicit in these arguments is that teacher experience just doesn’t matter to student performance,” she said. “Our research findings in New York and other areas really suggest a different model, a different approach. And that is to focus more on social capital, which is at least as important as human capital, and on the teaching body as a whole, rather than individual teachers. We should get rid of the ‘teacher-of-the-year model,’ and reward teachers only on the basis of school-wide improvements.”

In this context, Leana said, human capital, the arena that has drawn the most public-policy attention and funding, is a teacher’s cumulative abilities, knowledge and skills developed through formal and informal education and experience. Human capital can provide direct benefits in the form of superior performance and productivity, she said.

The concept of social capital captures both the structural relations among individual teachers and the resources that can be mobilized through those relationships.

“Social capital, in contrast to human capital, is not something about me, but rather the relationship I have with others: how people are connected to one another; how and how much they share information, particularly about their own subject area; how they build trust,” Leana said.

“Improving human capital is like saying, just bring in someone who’s smarter; but with social capital it’s not just what they know, it’s how they share information, it’s who they go to if they have a problem.”

The study showed a very high percentage of teachers, about 75 percent, interact with peers rather than master teachers or principals, she noted, which means resources financing master teachers largely are wasted.

Those teachers who interact frequently and closely with peers are more willing to reveal their problems and shortcomings and share other sensitive information. The study showed that this is important to a teacher’s development and improvement, especially for the less-able teachers, who are exposed to better-able counterparts, Leana said.

The study results highlight the benefit of fostering dense ties among teachers as an approach to helping teachers of lower ability, and suggest that correcting deficiencies in teacher ability will require context-specific approaches to remediation that are focused on actual practice.

Her study also demonstrated the positive effects of teacher social capital on school-level indicators of performance. “To improve schools, we should shift our focus to social capital rather than trying to improve individual teachers,” through more formal education, mandatory subject area testing for teachers or professional development programs, she said.

The problem is there is no time for teacher interaction during the school day. “Even at lunch, teachers are monitoring students. There should be time for teacher interaction built into the everyday schedule. Things would improve if that becomes more of a foundational part of the job — although that also means you have to hire more teachers to build that time into the schedule.”

The study also demonstrated that a teacher’s level of experience does matter to standardized-test success. The study data indicate that five years or more of experience at a grade level is associated with a 5.9 percent rise in student achievement compared to students with less-experienced teachers.

In summary, Leana said, the tactics recommended by conventional public school reform advocates — improving teaching training programs, adjusting curriculum or bringing in more outsiders to aid in improving student performance — have, at best, little impact.

And while improving human capital does improve student performance, Leana said, real reform must recognize and incorporate enhanced social capital tailored to the teaching workforce; move away from the emphasis on the individual “star” teacher to the school’s entire group of teachers; encourage the formation of teams of teachers, particularly focused on a subject area, and recognize that experience is beneficial to improving student performance.

—Peter Hart