Lowest Performing, Poorest Texas Schools Get Least Skilled Teachers, Study Says - November 18th, 2010

Students in low performing and high poverty Texas schools have far less access to the same level of teacher quality as students in high performing, low poverty and predominantly White Texas schools, according to a recent University of Texas at Austin study.

Dr. Ed Fuller, a researcher in the College of Education’s Department of Educational Administration, is a nationally known expert on the distribution in Texas of teacher quality and how it relates to student achievement. He conducted this most recent teacher quality study for the Association of Texas Professional Educators with the goal of documenting the distribution of teacher quality across Texas schools, creating a composite measure of teacher quality and establishing a statistically significant relationship between teacher quality and student achievement.

Key findings of the study include:

teacher quality is associated with student achievement, especially at the secondary level
students in lower performing schools have significantly less access to high quality teachers than students at higher performing schools
at all grade levels, but especially in middle and high schools, students in high-poverty, predominantly minority schools have far less access to skilled teachers than students in low-poverty and predominantly White schools

Fuller noted that the disparities were most evident in large metropolitan areas like Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston and Austin.

Among Fuller’s recommendations for Texas policy makers and top state education-related agencies are:

provide monetary incentives for school districts to address teacher quality inequities
offer monetary incentives to school districts to attend to quality inequities and allow the districts greater spending flexibility to improve the distribution of teacher quality across campuses
fund and support the gathering of input from teachers and administrators on improving teacher quality and the equitable distribution of it
support the creation of urban teacher and leader academies in the 10 largest Texas metro areas
raise requirements for getting into Texas teacher preparation programs
improve state education data collection and dissemination
improve the school accountability system

Fuller currently is working on a similar study regarding Texas principal quality and distribution.

Down a copy of Fuller’s 2010 teacher quality study.

—Kay Randall, University Communications, 512-232-3910