The Impact of Collaborative Teachers on School-Wide Student Achievement in the New York City Department of Education

The objective of this research was to investigate the relationship between a teacher’s view of professional development opportunities available to them (as measured by the Collaborative Teachers’ series of questions on the New York City Department of Education (NYC DOE) teacher questionnaire) to their school’s student achievement data (as measured by the school’s English and math test scores). While the United States Department of Education examines teacher collaboration annually, there is a lag in publishing data; the New York City Department of Education (NYC DOE) releases teacher collaboration data annually ((Marsh, Pane, & Hamilton, 2006; Rotermund, DeRoche, Ottem, National Center for Education Statistics (ED), & Insight Policy Research, 2017). I address three research questions: (1) How is the school’s overall score on the Collaborative Teachers’ questions related to student achievement data? (2) Is there a relationship between the Collaborative Teachers’ questions and years of staff experience? (3) Is there a relationship between the years of principal experience at a school and the collaborative teacher questions? Data for the first question indicated that teacher collaboration had a positive and significant relationship with student achievement. Data for the second question indicated that the percent of teachers with three or more years of experience had a positive and significant relationship with the collaborative teacher score but not with the student achievement score. Data for the third question indicated that principals with respect to management, feedback, and confidence were positively and significantly correlated to student achievement scores. These findings suggest that teacher collaboration has the potential to influence student achievement