Do disadvantaged schools have poorer teachers? Rethinking assumptions about the relationship between teaching quality and school-level advantage

Abstract

Improving educational performance, including narrowing equity gaps, is frequently touted as a matter of improving the quality of teachers in the lowest performing, often disadvantaged, schools. However, the assumption that teaching is of poorer quality in disadvantaged schools is largely unsubstantiated. Using the Quality Teaching Model of pedagogy, we observed 832 lessons in 193 New South Wales primary schools and found a small relationship between teaching quality and school-level advantage. However, when 174 teachers from across the school spectrum participated in Quality Teaching Rounds we found equivalent, and substantial, gains in teaching quality across all levels of school advantage. This result indicates that differences in teaching quality are less a reflection of teacher capabilities than of the challenging circumstances in disadvantaged schools. We argue that policies seeking more equitable achievement should address wider social inequities, rather than unfairly blaming teachers for being unable to level an unequal playing field.

The spatial implications of academic achievement in Year 12: Rethinking discourses of disadvantage in rural locations

“…Berliner, 2011;Hornby & Witte, 2014;Macqueen, 2012). More positively, recent research has indicated that less advantaged schools do not necessarily have poorer quality teachers (Gore et al, 2021). What is The results presented here suggest that the nature of rural inequality is very different to that which dominates the discourses about student and school disadvantage.…”

“…Berliner, 2011; Hornby & Witte, 2014; Macqueen, 2012). More positively, recent research has indicated that less advantaged schools do not necessarily have poorer quality teachers (Gore et al, 2021). What is evident, then, is that current redistributive measures to address inequitable outcomes have only had marginal success and further approaches are necessary.…”

More money does not necessarily help: relations of education expenditure, school characteristics, and academic resilience across 36 education systems

“…Specifically, indicators reflecting the school's emphasis on academic success, as well as the climate of order and safety, exhibit lower levels when teaching quality is diminished. This phenomenon can be partially elucidated by the findings of Gore et al (2022), who discovered that differences in teaching quality are less a reflection of teacher capabilities than of challenging circumstances. A better school climate may mitigate disturbances during class, thereby enabling teachers to focus on improving teaching interactions rather than classroom management.…”

Schooling for equitable excellence: principles of systemic design

“…, 1996), is a culturally situated and empirically validated framework for assessing the quality of instruction (Gore, 2021). Drawing from a series of studies conducted over the past 20 years, but particularly 2014–2020, focused on observations of entire lessons (not extracts), there is little difference in the quality of instruction based on school location, the socio-economic status of students, or length of experience of the teacher (Gore et al. , 2022).…”

“…Example 4: In the Australian context, the Quality Teaching model, which has a lineage back through Productive Pedagogy (Ladwig, 2007) and before that Authentic Pedagogy (Newmann et al, 1996), is a culturally situated and empirically validated framework for assessing the quality of instruction (Gore, 2021). Drawing from a series of studies conducted over the past 20 years, but particularly 2014-2020, focused on observations of entire lessons (not extracts), there is little difference in the quality of instruction based on school location, the socio-economic status of students, or length of experience of the teacher (Gore et al, 2022). This is not overly surprising when factoring in evidence that only a small minority of schools has effects that are significantly different from the average school (Marks, 2023).…”