Thinking Large: Bryan Hassel on Teacher Quality and Education Reform

Bryan Hassel is Co-Director of Public Impact, a policy research and management consulting firm, whose mission is to dramatically improve learning outcomes for all children in the U.S., with a special focus on students who are not served well. Dr. Hassel received his Ph.D. in public policy from Harvard University and his master’s degree in politics from Oxford University, which he attended as a Rhodes Scholar. He is a senior affiliate with the Center on Reinventing Public Education, and a nonresident senior fellow with Education Sector.

The Chicago Policy Review’s Jacob Rosch spoke with Dr. Hassel to discuss teacher quality, and the future of education reform.

Most policymakers acknowledge that human capital is a critical element in education reform, but most of the conversation is around compensation or evaluation policies. What’s missing from the discussion around teacher quality? 

I think two things have been missing. First, a reality check about how far we can get with the strategies we’re currently using. Our modeling suggests that even if we were much better at recruiting, much better at retaining our best teachers, and much better at dismissing bad teachers, we still would not have a majority of classrooms with excellent teachers. And so we need new strategies

The second thing we’re missing is a focus on excellent teachers: the top 20 to 25 percent of teachers. These are teachers who get well over a year’s worth of progress with students, on average and consistently. That’s the kind of gains we need to close achievement gaps and meet international standards. We focus too much on the bottom end of the teacher distribution and we’re missing a big opportunity to leverage the 20 to 25 percent of teachers at the top to reach more kids.

And that’s where they come together. The new strategy we want to see added to the mix, not just recruiting, not just retaining, but leveraging the best teachers to reach vastly more students.

What do you mean by “leveraging the best teachers?”

I’m talking about redesigning roles in schools and using technology so that more students have access to the best teachers. So, for example, what we call “time-technology swaps,” having kids spend part of the day in age appropriate digital learning, which frees the teacher’s times so that she can have more students coming through her class over the course of the day.

Or multi-classroom leadership, where a great teacher, who also has leadership skills, leads a team of other teachers and takes responsibility for a whole pod of students, not just one classroom. Or elementary specialization, having the best math teacher in fourth grade teach math all the time so that every class gets the best math instruction, not just one.

We’ve developed 20 plus models like this, which schools could use to increase the number of students who have access to the best teachers.

What’s preventing more schools from using these models?

There are two kinds of barriers. One is barriers of the mind. We all have gone to school with a certain model: One teacher in charge of each classroom, and that’s the way it works. It’s really a different way to think about things, when you break away from that model.

There are policy barriers as well. There are barriers against paying great teachers when they reach more students in places that use a single salary schedule, for example.

There are barriers that make it hard to reallocate resources to use technology in the ways that we’re talking about. Because money is allocated for a number of certain staff positions. And there are others as well.

That said, there is a lot of scope within the existing policy set for schools to do this work. We’re seeing a lot of schools that are trying to innovate, whether they’re charter schools or traditional public schools. And so we’re seeing a lot of schools trying these models even though policy changes would be needed to do them at scale.

What are some of the most exciting developments or reforms that you see coming in education?

I do really think that the combination of staffing, redesigning roles, and using technology to change how many people get the best teachers is one of the big trends that I hope will make a huge difference.

More generally, what’s happening in digital learning is potentially transformative as well. Digital learning has the potential to radically personalize learning for students. It has the potential to engage students in ways that they aren’t always engaged. And it has the potential to generate data that can much more rapidly inform practice than we get when we don’t have that constant flow of data from the work kids are doing.

I think another set of exciting elements, which I’m less familiar with, has to do with the growing understanding scientists have of how brains work and develop. It’s hard to predict what that’s going to yield, but I think that education is going to be transformed in the next twenty years by a better understanding of biology. But that’s not my specialty, so I can’t comment on it.

To return a little more to the ground, I think the final one is that we’ve spent the last 20 years developing a small set of really awesome new schools, especially in urban areas, that have radically improved results for kids. And I think the next phase of that is much more rapid growth of successful schools. We ought to see a much larger market share over time of these schools that are really knocking it out of the park for kids.

Featured image: cc/LaPrimaDonna