Climb Every Mountain: Teachers Who Think They Should Make a Difference ... Do!

The basics of No Child Left Behind (NCLB)--adequate yearly progress benchmarks, provision of supplemental services, and a highly qualified teacher in every classroom--are known. And the intense scrutiny of the of those basics has resulted in a mix of impassioned criticism and effusive praise. But what has been left largely unexamined in the hubbub is perhaps the law's central, if unspoken, principle: that a serious commitment to learning-for-all can help make it so. Indeed, the NCLB legislation calls for from teachers and schools for student learning. Yet we know very little about whether a teacher's own sense of responsibility for that learning makes any difference to student achievement. We know even less about how to nurture that sense of responsibility. I set out to explore both questions. My study of a nationally representative sample of 1st graders and their teachers suggests that teachers who take personal responsibility for student learning can improve student achievement; specifically, children with teachers who have a greater sense of responsibility for student outcomes learn more in reading during the 1st grade. Unfortunately, the findings presented here also suggest that the teachers of economically disadvantaged students, the very students NCLB targets as most in need of teachers and schools that take responsibility for their learning, are less likely to take responsibility for student outcomes. The way forward, however, should not be dedicated solely to the daunting task of identifying, hiring, and retaining more responsible teachers. I found that a teacher's work environment has a strong relationship with her commitment to student learning. Teachers who report that their school's leadership is supportive of their efforts in the classroom have a much greater sense of responsibility, as do teachers in Catholic schools. Improving the quality of school leadership could also be an effective means of staffing our nation's classrooms with responsible teachers. Teacher Responsibility and Student Learning To find out whether a teacher's sense of responsibility affects student learning, I first had to define the terms. I determined that a teacher has a sense of responsibility when she willingly accepts credit for students' positive outcomes and also accepts blame for their negative outcomes. Rather than attribute poor grades or low test scores to faults within students or to deficits in their backgrounds, responsible teachers attribute much of the cause to their own efforts and behavior. At its best, responsibility represents a teacher's commitment to make learning happen for her students. And though student achievement is easily defined, I did have to account for a host of other potential influences on it, including other teacher characteristics (such as certification status, post-college coursework, and years of experience as a 1st-grade teacher), the student's social background (family income), classroom characteristics (average family income, percent minority), and, most important, the student's previous achievement (kindergarten test score). Accounting for such social and academic background characteristics does temper the concern that teachers with strong senses of responsibility are more likely to select high-achieving students. To capture the strength of a teacher's sense of responsibility for student learning, I took advantage of the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Kindergarten Cohort (ECLS-K) prepared by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). The ECLS-K is the only national data set that links information on teachers' attitudes to student outcomes. It is based on periodic surveys that track information on a nationally representative sample of elementary-school students, their teachers, and the 1,280 public and private schools they attend. …