Welcome
Last week, Republicans on the House Appropriations Subcommittee on
Education proposed major cuts to teacher assistant positions. According to the
NC Department of Public Instruction, the proposed 49 percent cut to the $528
million teacher assistant appropriation in the continuation budget would
eliminate approximately 8,800 state-funded positions. Naturally, Democrats and
the special-interest groups that support them (e.g., NC Association of
Educators) are not happy about their proposal.
In this week’s newsletter, I discuss peer-reviewed research that has focused on
the relationship between teacher assistants and student performance.
Bulletin Board
- Learn what politicians, left-wing economic professors and the
liberal media don’t want you to know about economics, all without the confusion
and clutter of complicated mathematical equations. Attend the Civitas
Institute’s Free Market Academy on Saturday, April 30, from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. at
the Fairfield Inn & Suites in Elizabeth City, NC. Cost is $5.00. Register
online at http://www.nccivitas.org/events
or call 919-834-2099. -
Do you want insight into the wacky world of Washington, DC
from someone on the inside? Stephen F. Hayes, senior writer at The Weekly
Standard and Fox News contributor, will be the guest speaker at a Headline
Luncheon on May 4 at 12:00 p.m. The event will be held at Sisters Garden on
Millbrook Road in Raleigh and cost $35 per person. To register, visit https://www.johnlocke.org/events/event.html?id=890. -
Early April marks a major milestone for college-bound high
school seniors: the end of a long college search. That task may be easier in
the future, thanks to a new web site created by the John William Pope Center for Higher Education
Policy. NC College Finder (nccollegefinder.org)
provides a wide range of information on 54 accredited four-year universities in
the state. -
On Thursday, April 14, the Winston-Salem/Forsyth County
Public Schools and the Civitas Institute of Raleigh are sponsoring a half-day
education budget seminar. The seminar is open to school board members and
school leaders throughout North Carolina and will be focused exclusively on
current budget problems and strategies for addressing these challenges. The
Winston-Salem/Forsyth County Public Schools Training Building (4801 Bethania
Station Road, Winston-Salem, NC) will be the training site. Registration for
the event is $30.00 and includes lunch. After April 7, registration will be
$40.00. Register online at www.nccivitas.org/events
or by calling 919-834-2099. - The North Carolina History Project
would like educators and homeschool parents to submit lesson plans suitable for
middle and high school courses in North Carolina history. Please provide links
to NC History Project encyclopedia articles and other primary and secondary
source material, if possible. Go to http://www.northcarolinahistory.org/edu_corner
for further information. - You will find wisdom, knowledge,
and purpose at our research
newsletter archive.
CommenTerry
At the beginning of the current
school year, North Carolina public school districts employed over 26,000
teacher assistants, the third largest personnel category in North Carolina
public schools. Districts averaged one teacher assistant for every 49 students.
Tyrell County had the lowest assistant/student ratio (1:24), while Anson County
had the highest (1:89). The total number of teacher assistants has been on the
decline since 2008-09, a year when the total number of teacher assistants
reached 30,000.
Despite substantial investments in paraprofessionals in North Carolina
and beyond, education researchers have not produced an overwhelming amount of
high-quality research on the relationship between teacher assistants and
student performance. Even so, a handful of rigorous, peer-reviewed studies have
been conducted over the last decade suggest that the presence of teacher
assistants and other paraprofessionals has done little to increase student
achievement.
The following are selections from the abstracts of three notable studies on
teacher assistants and student performance:
- Whilst overall, pupils exposed to the whole class
systematic phonics approach showed a significant improvement in reading
performance, no added value was noted for pupils receiving learning support
assistance. On the contrary, the results suggest that learning support may
have a detrimental impact on lower ability readers. (Colette Gray, Sarah McCloy, Carol Dunbar, Jill Dunn, Denise Mitchell
and James Ferguson, "Added value or a familiar face?: The impact of
learning support assistants on young readers," Journal of Early Childhood
Research 5, 2007, 285; emphasis added) - "Having matched the 180
pupils in the project schools who had received support from an NSA (Numeracy
Support Assistant) with 180 pupils who had not on a number of variables,
including free meal eligibility, prior achievement, special needs, ethnicity
and gender, we found that pupils who had received NSA support did not make
more progress in mathematics than those who had not." (Daniel Muijs and David Reynolds,
"The effectiveness of the use of learning support assistants in improving
the mathematics achievement of low achieving pupils in primary school," Educational
Research 45:3, Winter 2003, 219-230; emphasis added) - "The analyses reported here extend previous
investigations, examining the functions and effects of teacher aides in depth. The
results showed that teacher aides have little, if any, positive effect on
students’ academic achievement. The only
positive effect was an improvement in reading scores for students who attended
a class with a teacher aide for 2 or 3 years. These results were the only
exceptions to a plethora of negative findings. The study also showed that the
types of duties aides performed had no bearing on student achievement."
(Susan B. Gerber, Jeremy D. Finn, Charles M. Achilles, and Jayne Boyd-Zaharias,
"Teacher Aides and Students’ Academic Achievement," Educational
Evaluation and Policy Analysis 23:2, Summer 2001, 123-143; emphasis added)
The third study is particularly important. Gerber et al.
analyzed data from Project STAR, the famous Tennessee class size reduction
initiative. The sample included nearly 22,000 students from kindergarten
through third grade. As part of their analysis, researchers incorporated
related findings on small class sizes from Project STAR, which allowed them to
determine whether class size or teacher assistant had a greater effect on
student performance. Researchers concluded that, "a full-time teacher aide
in the classroom is not a reasonable alternative to a class with fewer
students" (p. 134). Thus legislators who use Project STAR findings to
justify reducing class sizes should also support fewer teacher assistants.
Even strong proponents of teacher assistants caution that employing
paraprofessionals does not guarantee better outcomes for children. In fact, a
number of serious problems may arise when administrators assign
paraprofessionals to specialized populations like special-needs students. In a
May/June 2005 issue of Teaching Exceptional Children, Michael F. Giangreco and
his colleagues identified five reasons for concern.
- The least qualified
staff members are teaching students with the most complex learning
characteristics, often with little training, guidance, or understanding of the
disability. - Research indicates that
paraprofessional supports are linked with inadvertent detrimental effects, e.g., unnecessary dependence and
interference with peer interactions. - Additionally, researchers have
found that individual paraprofessional supports are linked with lower levels of
teacher involvement. - Teachers, parents, and students
may not be getting what they deserve and expect, i.e., an adequately trained,
supervised assistant that is thoughtfully integrated into classroom
instruction. - Providing paraprofessional
supports may delay attention to needed changes in schools, particularly changes
to working conditions and clearly defined roles and responsibilities.
Giangreco and his colleagues
believe that schools can avert these five concerns if administrators provide
additional support to and stronger collaboration between instructional and
paraprofessional staff. I am not so sure.
Clearly, some teacher assistants are invaluable to the teachers that
supervise them, but our current budget struggles force us to consider a
fundamental question — do teacher assistants raise educational productivity in
a measurable and meaningful way? The available research does not suggest an
affirmative answer.
Random Thought
The average price for a gallon of gasoline is at or above $4 in Alaska,
California, Connecticut, Hawaii, Illinois, New York, and Washington, D.C.
According to the Associated
Press, Michigan, Nevada, Washington, and Wisconsin may soon hit the
$4/gallon mark. Because I care, here is Time Magazine’s 10
Things You Can Like About $4 Gas.
Facts and Stats
26,306 — total full-time teacher assistants employed by
North Carolina public schools for the 2010-11 school year. Approximately 69
percent of all teacher assistant positions are funded with state dollars. (NC
DPI, "Highlights of the North Carolina Public School Budget,"
February 2011, p. 14.)
Mailbag
I would like to invite all readers
to submit announcements, as well as their personal insights, anecdotes,
concerns, and observations about the state of education in North Carolina. I
will publish selected submissions in future editions of the newsletter.
Anonymity will be honored. For additional information or to send a submission,
email Terry at [email protected].
Education Acronym of the Week
TA — teacher assistant
Quote of the Week
"We found no circumstances in which teaching
assistants consistently affected student performance…"
— Susan B. Gerber, Jeremy D. Finn, Charles M. Achilles,
and Jayne Boyd-Zaharias, "Teacher Aides and Students’ Academic
Achievement"
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Update archive.
