Instructional Policy and Classroom Performance: The Mathematics Reform in California

TLDR

Educational reformers aim to improve instruction by altering assessment, curriculum, and professional development policies, assuming these changes will shift teacher practice and boost student performance. The study formalizes the relationship among instructional policy, teaching, and learning into a simple model. Using a 1994 California teacher survey and CLAS student scores, the authors examine how assessment, curriculum, and professional development policies influence teacher practice and student achievement, positing that instructional policies shape teacher learning and thereby affect outcomes. The results confirm that, under identified conditions, policy influences teacher practice and both jointly affect student performance.

Abstract

Educational reformers increasingly seek to manipulate policies regarding assessment, curriculum, and professional development in order to improve instruction. They assume that manipulating these elements of instructional policy will change teachers’ practice, which will then improve student performance. We formalize these ideas into a rudimentary model of the relations among instructional policy, teaching, and learning. We propose that successful instructional policies are themselves instructional in nature: because teachers figure as a key connection between policy and practice, their opportunities to learn about and from policy are a crucial influence both on their practice and, at least indirectly, on student achievement. Using data from a 1994 survey of California elementary school teachers and 1994 student California Learning Assessment System (CLAS) scores, we examine the influence of assessment, curriculum, and professional development on teacher practice and student achievement. Our results bear out the usefulness of the model: under circumstances that we identify, policy can affect practice, and both can affect student performance.