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Social Capital and Teacher Performance
You’ve studied a rather large population of teachers and concluded that social capital is at least as important as human capital. What are the implications of that?
Leana: To me, the implications can be separated into a basic level and then a more advanced level. The basics are, I think, just good management about the factors that go into performance. Here we are talking about performance in a very complex job: classroom teaching. When I talk to business executives about how to most effectively manage performance issues, I use an over-simplification – but a useful one – to think about broad categories or “buckets” of potential issues. One big bucket holds all the issues around teacher ability, and the second big bucket contains issues regarding work motivation.
Ability
When you think about what’s in the ability bucket, particularly with the labor structure in public schools, managing is not so much about selecting the right teachers, because there just aren’t many school districts that are hiring like mad. Instead, a lot of the ability questions have more to do with resource allocation decisions among existing teaching staff.
How do you provide teachers with the resources so that they are able to do their jobs well? Those resources include time, which I think is incredibly important. If you don’t have fifteen extra minutes in your day, you are never going to learn anything about teaching math from your peers. You have to have the time, and that time has to be set aside for this purpose. I think there is also a lot to be said for (and I’ll get criticized by the economists for this) having some slack in the system and living with a certain amount of inefficiency in schools. When you think about public schools, particularly in the under-resourced areas and the hard-to-staff schools, there is no slack. Resources are stretched to the breaking point and teachers are overwhelmed with their responsibilities, both in and outside the classroom. Principals tend to manage by close monitoring and short-term incentives. In such an environment, social capital is very difficult to build and nearly impossible to sustain over time.
I have to tell you that if I were a teacher in that [type of] system, then I would be just as leery of administrators – and maybe even rebellious against their latest schemes. In many of these overburdened schools, administrators try to cope with performance problems by de-professionalizing the teaching staff. Essentially, they decide not to trust teachers to do their jobs. And to deal with that lack of trust, administrators try to script the practice of teaching as much as they can. In some popular curricula, everything the kids do is scripted; everything the teachers do is scripted. It is basically turning teaching into factory work. And if teachers, in turn, begin to act like factory workers, we shouldn’t be surprised. It seems to me we are missing a tremendous opportunity to work with the teachers unions on building social capital in schools – something that can be beneficial to teachers, children, and school administrators. Instead, we are always talking about efficiency when we really ought to be talking about effectiveness. Because over the long term, despite all our schemes regarding curriculum “improvements” and teacher “development,” we haven’t gotten much better at improving the ability of teachers to do their jobs well.
Motivation
In the second bucket is the motivation issue, which essentially entails providing rewards and incentives for teachers. One thing that I think is a very bad idea is individual incentives for teachers in public schools. I think these should be replaced with group-level incentives. The idea of rewarding an individual teacher for individual student performance levels doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. 
What we should be trying to do in public schools is not just improve Mrs. Smith’s third-grade class. Instead, what we should be thinking about is improving the school as a whole so that when Johnny moves to fourth grade he will again have a good teacher – one who can build on all the hard work that Mrs. Smith has already put in.
So here’s a radical idea: Let’s get rid of the “teacher of the year” award! This is an individual incentive where we select one and only one teacher who will be honored as superior to all others. It just strikes me as so anti–social capital and serves to foster competitive, rather than cooperative behavior. For a lot of teachers who are very good at their jobs the only extrinsic reward they get is being singled out as the “best” teacher in the school. Such a system is perverse in that it discourages the best teacher from helping others because doing so only jeopardizes her own status if all the other teachers become as good as she is. All I can say is, look at the evidence: singling out all these “best” teachers in the school, the district, the state, the country, year in and year out, hasn’t improved public education very much. So I think it’s high time to try a different approach to incentives. And our data clearly argue for an emphasis on social capital rather than individual human capital.
Linking Teacher Incentives and Student Learning: Principles of Change
If social capital is so important, how do you build it and who can help build it?
Leana: Pretend there is a blackboard where we’ve written “teacher incentives” way on the left-hand side and “student learning” way on the right-hand side. That seems to be the current thinking of economists, who are primarily focused on designing elegant incentive models for teachers, and educators, who are focused primarily on designing nuanced student assessment systems. But what’s missing is the tremendous amount of black space in the middle of the board. And you really need to go into that “black box” of process if you are going to create effective strategies for change.
These strategies are not going to be cookie cutter; they can’t be. But you can have generalized principles for change, and they can be replicated across school settings. And we know from our research that these principles must include social capital as well as human capital. And fundamental to social capital is a shared feeling among teachers that each of them is going to do more than they have to do, because each knows they can count on others to do more, too. They have a shared destiny and a shared purpose, so that each individual doesn’t have to get an immediate payoff every time he or she does a little extra for the school as a whole.
You can begin by asking schools and districts, teachers and parents, how they would build a culture of trust. What would that mean? What would that look like here? How would we do that in our context? These are the basic design principles for which schools and districts must be held accountable. Without them, I fear that the next round of school reforms will be no more successful than all the previous ones.
But I am hopeful. Our research makes me hopeful because it provides a clear direction for building and sustaining successful schools.
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References
Pil, F. K., and C. Leana. 2006. “Social Capital and Organizational Performance: Evidence from Urban Public Schools,” Organization Science 17, no. 3 (May–June):353–366.
Shevchuk, I., C. Leana, and V. Mittal. 2008. “Teacher Retention and School Performance: The Role of Organization- and Task-Specific Forms of Human and Social Capital.” Working paper. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh, Center for Health and Care Work.
