The three largest school systems in Georgia, tasked with screening avalanches of job applicants, use a high-tech tool that’s supposed to identify people with a passion for teaching.
Gallup Inc., the polling firm, says its TeacherInsight service can predict the likelihood of success of future educators, although some question that assertion.
Gwinnett and Cobb counties’ school systems have used the Gallup service for several years, and DeKalb County came on board last year and recently renewed its contract. Between them, the three school districts employ more than 20,000 teachers, so Gallup’s online test for job candidates is helping to shape the next generation of teachers in metro Atlanta.
In Cobb County, applicants outnumber available teaching positions by 30 to 1, said Tim Baker, executive director of employment. “You just get inundated.”
The Gallup test measures “talent” and whether a prospective teacher is “engaging” and can connect with children, Baker said. “They’re getting to the innate ability to teach.”
Gallup says its test can measure motivation, relationship-building, creativity and organization, but basically says “trust us” on that: The company’s methods, computer models and data are proprietary and confidential.
Applicants answer about 100 questions online, and the software generates a numerical score and bar charts that rate them on various qualities. Gallup has been assessing aspiring teachers for decades, developed the online test in 2005 and has rated more than 2 million teacher candidates and nearly 1 million principal candidates at 300 school districts, said Tim Hodges, director of research for Gallup’s educational arm in Omaha, Neb.
The test probes for “recurring patterns of thought, feeling and behavior that can be productively applied in teaching,” Hodges said. “It’s not a reading test, it’s not a logic test. It’s about getting to the talent you have,” he said. “We’re really trying to get at who is this person at the core.”
Gallup measures the predictive power of its questions by comparing the test results against the job performance of test takers who get hired.
There is no one way to use the data. Some school systems send their principals only the top-scoring candidates. Others just send the scores and let principals decide how to use them. Principals are thus armed with information in addition to the traditional measures, such as college degrees and work experience.
Cobb has been using the service for several years at an annual cost of about $80,000, Baker said. DeKalb signed on last year, and in October renewed its $112,400 annual contract for both the teacher service and a similar one, PrincipalInsight. Gwinnett has been using the teacher service since 2003 and pays $89,300 a year, and in 2004 added the principal screening service, which costs another $30,600, spokesman Jorge Quintana said.
Gallup provides “a fast, effective way to source and assess a large volume of applicants,” Quintana said.
None of the school systems would make a teacher or principal who’d taken the test available for an interview.
The secrecy surrounding a tool that is shaping the public teacher workforce is troubling to Sharon Robinson. As president and chief executive officer of the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education, she defends the traditional way of measuring teachers: by their academic performance.
Gallup’s “pre-screening” tool, as DeKalb calls it, can augment interviews but should not be used to shape the pool of candidates who get interviewed, Robinson said.
Moreover, she could find no independent research to verify Gallup’s predictive claims. “I am dubious about the predictive validity of this,” Robinson said, adding that if schools are going to rely on the service, then they owe it to the public to conduct their own validity studies or to push Gallup to support independent research.
Robinson sympathizes with school districts trying to manage hiring with downsized central offices. The Gallup service is relatively inexpensive, she said, but hiring is a long-term investment with big consequences for bad decisions.
“I would urge that there is no more strategic and important decision than whom you hire,” Robinson said. “This means we should look askance at some of the quick fixes.”
Knowledge and skills, Robinson said, are more important than the disposition or philosophy that Gallup claims to measure. “There is more to teaching than a good heart and a love of kids,” she said. “This is not missionary work; this is professional practice.”
Baker, the Cobb employment director, said the school district doesn’t use the Gallup scores to limit the candidate pool. Rather, it lets principals decide how to use the data when weighing whether a prospective teacher can connect with students and engage them.
If a teacher can’t capture a student’s attention, Baker said, it doesn’t matter how much that teacher knows. He recalled his own college days: “I had plenty of professors who were just brilliant,” he said, “but were awful at teaching.”
