Organizing for Quality in Education: Individualistic and Systemic Approaches to Teacher Quality.

Abstract

Reliability in education and its outcomes has long been elusive in the United States, especially for disadvantaged students. Because teachers are the most important school-based influence on student learning, this dissertation investigates the key challenges involved in defining and organizing to improve teaching quality in the U.S. In the first of three essays, I examine the research literature on teacher and teaching quality from the 1890s to the present to understand why such sustained empirical work has failed to generate a coherent, actionable knowledge base for teaching. I identify five lines of research on teacher and teaching quality with different implications for reform. I conclude that two fundamental features of the American educational landscape—the absence of a common set of goals and technologies for practice, and a political system that encourages variability—have undermined their success. The second and third essays are based upon a 2009-2010 case study of Achievement First (AF), a high-performing charter management organization that has built an alternative to a traditional school district. I draw upon 41 semi-structured interviews with network leaders, school leaders, and teachers; archival data; and observations to investigate how AF was working to define, develop, and coordinate teaching quality throughout their rapidly expanding network. I found that AF was in the early stages of constructing an infrastructure of practice—or set of integrated tools, structures, and practices—that was being used to develop the knowledge and skill of individual educators and their collective capability. This emergent infrastructure served as a scaffold for individual and organizational learning, and as a framework organizing the outcomes of these efforts; as a safety net for individual and organizational performance; and as a haven from the broader system. Particularly for more veteran educators, it could also act as an impediment to growth. Even in its nascent form AF’s infrastructure offers powerful insight into the possibilities and challenges involved in building a professional knowledge base for teaching. Still, the AF case study calls into question education reform strategies that assume that high-performing CMOs like AF can expand at the meteoric pace that would be necessary to reduce achievement gaps nationally.