Contexto actual de la profesión y rutinas profesionales

and Student demographics

The purpose of this section was to examine if teacher quality was equitably distributed across schools with different ac- countability ratings and that serve different populations of economically disadvantaged students and minority students. To do so, I present a series of tables for each school level that examine the TQI rating across schools with different accountabil- ity ratings, percentages of economically disadvantaged students, and percentages of minority students. Before presenting the findings, I describe the data employed in this section.

School accountability ratings were taken from the AEIS school reference data file downloaded from the TEA website.

The criteria for determining school accountability ratings can be found at: http://ritter.tea.state.tx.us/perfreport/ac- count/2009/manual/index.html. The ratings were after Required Improvement, the Texas Projection Measure, and Excep- tions were applied to the data by TEA.

In this analysis, the purpose of the accountability ratings was not necessarily to identify low- and high-performing schools

because the TAKS score analysis does that far more accurately than the accountability ratings. This was especially true

given the concerns over the accuracy of the Texas Projection Measure. Rather, this study employs school accountability

ratings because teachers perceive that schools with higher ratings are easier places to teach. Holding all other factors equal,

most teachers would prefer to become employed in schools that are easier places to work. Now, teachers’ perceptions may change as more doubt is cast on the validity of the accountability ratings, but teachers will typically choose a school with a higher accountability rating if all other factors are held equal.

The percentage of economically disadvantaged students was constructed using data from the 2008-09 AEIS data file on

student demographics. A student was determined to be economically disadvantaged if he/she participated in the federal free- or reduced-priced lunch program or met other criteria as determined by TEA. At each school level, the total sample of schools was divided equally into quintiles with each quintile having roughly the same number of schools.

The percentage of minority students was constructed using data from the 2008-09 AEIS data file on student demographics. The percentage of minority students was calculated as the sum of the percentage of Hispanic students and the percentage of African American

students. The total sample of schools was divided equally into quintiles with each quintile having roughly the same number of schools.

Elementary Schools

Accountability Ratings

As with the analysis by student achievement, schools with greater achievement as measured by accountability ratings had

greater TQI ratings than schools with lower achievement as measured by accountability ratings. Specifically, the differences

in TQI ratings between schools rated Exemplary and schools rated Academically Unacceptable were between 0.65 and

0.95 standard deviations. However, because the number of academically unacceptable schools was very small, the results of

Economically Disadvantaged Students

As shown in Table 12, the lowest-poverty schools (those with less than 33.3% students participating in the free- and reduced-price lunch program) had a slightly greater “Regress” TQI and much greater average TQI ratings than the highest- poverty schools (those with more than 91.3% students participating in the free- and reduced-price lunch program). For the Regress TQI, there was little variation across schools by poverty level. In contrast, there was almost a one standard devia- tion difference between the lowest- and highest-poverty schools in the average TQI ratings.

Part of this small difference in the Regress TQI is due to the correlation between the percentage of economically dis-

advantaged students and the percentage of Hispanic students. Four region service centers—ESC 1 (Edinburg), ESC 2 (Corpus Christi), ESC 19 (El Paso), and ESC 20 (San Antonio)—enrolled 44% of all Hispanic students and employed 60% of all Hispanic teachers. While these regions have seen tremendous growth over the past decade, which would require the hiring of new teachers, Hispanic teachers have the lowest attrition rate of any teachers in Texas. Thus, many schools in these region ESCs have low teacher attrition rates and low percentages of novice teachers. Hence, such schools have relatively

greater Regress TQI ratings than one would expect given the student population.

As shown in Table 13, the difference in the Regress TQI between the lowest- and highest-poverty schools increases to

Minority Students

In this analysis, the percentage of minority students is the combined percentage of African American and Hispanic

students enrolled in a school. Again, as with the economically disadvantaged student analysis, the difference in the Regress TQI was relatively small while the differences in the average TQI ratings were much larger.

Again, as with the previous analysis, the removal of the four predominantly Hispanic regions increases the Regress TQI

from .119 standard deviations to .313 standard deviations.

Table 16 below presents by school achievement and student characteristics the percentage of novice teachers and teach- ers who had taught at least three of the last five years. Novice teachers were those who had taught three or fewer years. This experience could have been in Texas public or private schools or in a public or private school in another state. Teachers who have taught at least three out of the last five years were those who have been employed in Texas public schools at least

three of the five years between 2004-05 and 2008-09.

As shown, lower-performing, high-poverty schools, and schools with high percentages of minority students had greater percentages of novice teachers and lower percentages of teachers who had taught at least three of the past five academic years than higher-performing, low-poverty schools, and schools with low percentages of minority students.