Study Says Most 1st Grade Classes Not High Quality

Achievement Links

In previous studies, Mr. Pianta and his colleagues have shown that less-advantaged students do as well as their better-off peers in classrooms where teachers exhibit the practices that the researchers’ scoring system measures—sensitivity, positive emotional support, helpful feedback, and organization, among other features.

Those results have spurred some states and districts to adopt the scale, known as the Classroom Observation System, for use in their own evaluation and professional-development efforts, Mr. Pianta said. A preschool version of the system is due to be used, starting next year, to monitor classes supported by the Head Start program for disadvantaged preschoolers.

“The results are hardly surprising,” said Kate Walsh, the president of the Washington-based National Council on Teacher Quality, a research and advocacy group that has championed higher standards for teachers. What’s surprising, she added, is that the same sorts of patterns aren’t reflected in the teacher evaluations normally carried out in schools.

“If it’s possible to do this in 800 classrooms, there’s no reason that principals can’t do it as well,” Ms. Walsh said.

As in their previous studies, and other teacher-quality research, the University of Virginia researchers found that teachers whose classrooms got high ratings were unevenly distributed. Children who had scored low on achievement tests in preschool, were from poor or working-poor families, or were nonwhite were twice as likely to be in low-quality classrooms as high-quality classrooms, the study says.

The study also found that teachers’ years of experience and the sizes of their classes did not seem to have an effect on the quality of the classroom learning environment.

“Further,” the report says, “the link between family background or low attainment and poor-quality educational opportunity is not going to be broken simply by assigning children to private schools, because private school 1st grades were less likely to be in the highest-quality groups” than those located in public schools.

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