Advancing the Teaching Profession

Beyond the Hype: Asking Better Questions About Teacher Preparation

Be sure to check out Dan Brown’s latest Huffington Post essay on the considerable publicity of Teach for America and the misunderstanding of the human capital challenges facing our nation’s highest-need schools. Dan, an excellent young teacher in a DC charter school, offers up key facts typically ignored by policy pundits and journalists in their ongoing analysis of the teaching profession and all its ills. Even bright college graduates need the right kind of training and support to be effective — and need to stay in teaching for longer than two years to make a meaningful difference.

Dan, a former NY Teaching Fellow and author of The Great Expectations School, describes in his must-read book how his lack of preparation left him unable to meet the needs of the students he served. Researchers like Richard Ingersoll, who does not have a dog in this ideological fight, have documented carefully that poorly prepared teachers (from whatever source) who exit the profession quickly leave their students to be taught by the next round of ill-trained novices who routinely replace them. A recent investigation has shown that “schools with high teacher turnover rates have difficulty planning and implementing a coherent curriculum and sustaining positive working relationships among teachers.”¹ Other studies have found that entrants from strong teacher education programs both stay in teaching significantly longer and achieve stronger student achievement gains that those of either alternative route entrants or weak traditional programs.²

TFA has developed a masterful teacher recruitment strategy and created a potentially powerful mechanism to replenish the teaching profession with bright young minds eager to make a difference. But what if TFA worked to support a cadre of its Corps members to develop their teaching talents in a “residency” program (which I have written about at length), with incentives and supports to remain in teaching for five years? What if TFAers worked under the tutelage of seasoned experts — ensuring that all students have access to a stable team of teachers, organized and supported to maximize their collective skills and energy? What if we got out of the either-or rhetoric that so dominates the teaching quality debates of late and moved to some and/both thinking and action? We need to be thinking about what will make teaching a career that TFAers want to stay in. Keep an eye out for more from Teacher Leaders Network on this front — as Dan (a new member) and other Gen Y and X teachers join us in finding fresh solutions to the vexing problem of ensuring a qualified and effective teacher for every child. If we are willing to ask the questions differently, we might find some innovative answers that actually work.

1 Guin, K. (2004, August 16). Chronic teacher turnover in urban elementary schools. Education Policy Analysis Archives, 12(42). Retrieved April 23 from http://epaa.asu.edu/epaa/v12n42/.

2 Boyd, D., Grossman, P., Lankford, H., Loeb, S., & Wyckoff, J. (September 2008). Teacher preparation and student achievement. NBER Working Paper No. W14314. National Bureau of Economic Research. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1264576.

The Strategic Mismanagement of Human Capital

I am off to meet with some very thoughtful educators, policymakers, and business leaders in Colorado this morning to assist the state in its efforts to strategically manage human capital for its public schools.  Conventional wisdom is that the path to teaching quality is best taken by recruiting more talented individuals to the profession and paying them for performance goals. Worthy goals — for sure. But if you have not paid much attention to ongoing efforts to better understand the role of working conditions in strategically managing human capital, it is time to do so. If you believe working conditions do not matter, take a look at this description by a well-prepared newbie in Dallas — suggesting that school districts seem to be in the business of mismanaging human capital. In this district, this new teacher was misassigned to teach the wrong classes, had to work out of four portables, was required to attend mandated professional development that ran counter to research-based teaching practices learned in teacher education, and was given no access to the internet to use the system’s computerized attendance and grading program, and more.  I wonder how long this teacher will make it.

KIPP & Teacher Unions: A Growing Need for A Collective Voice from Those in the Classrooms

Alexander Russo’s recent blog points to the growing unionization of teachers at KIPP (and other charter) schools. The issue is not just pay and the typical working conditions — class size and the like.  As noted in the Chicago Catalyst story, “more than anything, (teachers) want a formal way to influence how schools are managed, from professional development decisions to curricular choices.” As a recent report from Ed Sector surfaced, since 2003 newcomers to teaching have come to believe even more so that their unions are “absolutely essential.” Why? Administrative fiats and policy mandates  often are built without knowledge of what works in the classroom — where teachers teach and students learn.  I guess there is something to teachers having influence on their professional lives and the students and families they serve.  Advocacy for teacher leadership and a collective voice for classroom experts may be the best path for closing the achievement gap.

Fix the Boat and Race to the Top

Today’s Education Week commentary by Linda Darling-Hammond and David Haselkorn points clearly to how American policymakers are missing the boat when it comes to teaching quality. Instead of relying on false dichotomies (traditional versus alternative certification) and poorly designed studies,  Ms. Darling-Hammond and Mr. Haselkorn note, “The answer is not to jettison teacher preparation, but to transform it, applying lessons from both traditional and alternative programs in new syntheses that substantially increase teachers' knowledge and skills.”

Policymakers can be distracted by misinterpreting empirical studies — like the recent Mathematic teacher education investigation  — which can come with missing context and overstated findings.

The recent McKinsey report on teacher quality pointed to Singapore and Finland, where they invest in the right kind of teacher education and professional development as well as performance pay. It is time to stop debating the merits of traditional teacher education (with its disconnected content and pedagogical courses, and weak student teaching) versus alternative certification (with its short-cut training regime that gives recruits few opportunities to learn on the job or develop adaptive teaching strategies to meet the needs of diverse students). As Darling-Hammond notes, “We must move beyond studying whether one weak approach to teacher training is no worse than another and focus on significantly increasing teacher capacity and effectiveness. Instead of tinkering at the margins, it’s time to fix the boat.”