Advancing the Teaching Profession

Teacher Preparation: Teachers Leading the Way

What better way to celebrate Teacher Appreciation Day than by sharing and discussing the ideas and experiences of teacher leaders? Today, CTQ released a report on teacher education, written by a team of 17 teachers with diverse preparation experiences. The report, TEACHING 2030: Leveraging Teacher Preparation 2.0, includes reflections on the current realities of teacher education, as well as recommendations for the future. The below post is adapated from my foreword to the report.

Debates continue to rage among analysts and researchers over whether university-based education schools should prepare teachers and how much training is needed before a new recruit teaches independently. Media outlets often portray teacher education as irrelevant at best. I am certain there is some truth that some education schools are guilty of emphasizing how children learn to read at the expense of making sure they know the mechanics of reading. But the critique of education schools often goes beyond the evidence—as well as beyond the pale. For example, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof recently made the claim that there are no special skills acquired in teacher training courses, only “snake-charming” ones. And there are “inside-the-Beltway” think tanks—using questionable research methods—that seem to make a decent living bashing education schools.

We know that there is often more variation within “traditional” and “alternative” approaches to teacher education than between them. But as described in TEACHING 2030: Leveraging Teacher Preparation 2.0, written by some of the nation’s best teachers, serious clinical preparation matters for early successes of new recruits. None of the top-performing nations in the world, such as Finland or Singapore, tolerates shortcuts into teaching. At the same time, our universities must continue to find innovative ways to ready nontraditional recruits for the rigors of teaching. Preservice teachers need customized preparation for the 21st-century pedagogical skills demanded by not just the Common Core State Standards, but the global economy in which students must participate.

Too much of today’s criticism of teacher education is driven by politics, not substance, and focuses on outdated issues instead of ones unique to the demands of 21st-century teaching and learning. Teacher preparation of today and tomorrow needs to equip new recruits to teach highly mobile students, develop their own assessments, improve data systems, engage parents and policymakers, and lead the transition of many of our high-needs schools into 24/7 community hubs.

I encourage you to dive into this report, written by educators who work with students every day. Their insights on “Teachevr Prep 2.0” provide a much-needed antidote to the current debate, and their thinking on “Teacher Prep 3.0”—led by Emily Vickery—should lead the next generation of discussions and action around teacher-education reform. TEACHING 2030: Leveraging Teacher Preparation 2.0, penned by 17 classroom experts, transcends the current divide and sets a path for ensuring that every teacher is ready to teach what students need to know, now and in the future.

I encourage you to read and engage with the teachers' ideas and recommendations—then tell us what you think in the Collaboratory.

3 Lessons for Education Schools and Policymakers

This is the second of two posts on AACTE's recent report, "The Changing Teacher Preparation Profession." Go here to read part one.

Debates continue to rage among analysts and researchers over whether university-based education schools should prepare teachers—and how much training is needed before a new recruit teaches independently. Much of the rhetoric, especially of the kind embellished by pseudo-scientific studies, is driven more by ideology than sound methodology and suggests that universities writ large do not prepare teachers adequately.

As I pointed out yesterday, AACTE’s new report, "The Changing Teacher Preparation Profession," filled with compelling evidence and exemplars, offers an authoritative antidote to many of the current myths about teacher education.

The report reveals that more talent is entering our nation's teacher preparation programs. It also shows that more is being done to make sure teacher candidates are learning how to teach—not in the ivory tower, but in the schools where they will actually be teaching.

But there's still more to do. We need to ensure that new recruits can work in teams to teach to the Common Core State Standards. This will allow teachers to develop and teach their own assessments that can inform their practice, spread expertise to colleagues, and revolutionize how we hold both universities and school districts (not to mention the policymakers who make the rules) accountable for teacher preparation. Even teacher education standards promoted of late have the look and feel of teaching in the late 1980s, not the second decade of the 21st century.

Let me be clear: It is time for education schools to recruit and prepare more teachers for our high-needs schools, but it is also time for policymakers to create the conditions for them to do so. I wonder what the likes of 21st-century-oriented education schools at Alverno College, CSU-Fresno, Morgan State University, the University of Central Florida, and the University of Cincinnati could do if they had the right policies behind them.

At the report's release event on Wednesday, I suggested three actions that need to be pursued:

1. The teaching profession must recognize and market its top-performing education schools—and expect all its members to meet high standards.
The new CAEP accreditation standards must pave the way, using multiple and valid indicators, to grade all institutions that prepare teachers. These include not just university programs, but school districts and nonprofits as well.

2. Policymakers must create incentives to promote collaboration among education schools.
To be more responsive to supply and demand, education schools must look beyond institutional and state lines. Universities will never be responsive to the field until policymakers ensure that school districts provide accurate and timely data about which teachers they need. And to counteract the longstanding role of education schools serving as the university cash cow, policymakers will also need to create additional financial incentives for education programs.

3. The teacher education community needs to promote fewer preparation programs.
Instead, it must invest more in deep clinical training and scholarships to prepare recruits for 21st-century public education. It is time for the education-school community to do what their counterparts in medicine did almost 90 years ago: eliminate weak programs and use the savings to deepen clinical training at the stronger schools.

Too much of today’s criticism of teacher education is driven by politics, not substance, and focuses on outdated issues instead of ones unique to the demands of 21st-century teaching and learning. In the coming weeks, 17 teacher leaders from the CTQ Collaboratory will release their own report on the kind of teacher preparation needed to equip new recruits to teach highly mobile students, develop their own assessments, improve data systems, engage parents and policymakers, and lead the transition of many of our high-needs schools into 24/7 community hubs. I encourage you to dive into their report as well, written by educators who work with students each and every day.

4 Lessons for Teacher Education Reform

Yesterday the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education (AACTE) released "The Changing Teacher Preparation Profession: A Report from AACTE’s Professional Education Data System (PEDS)" at a National Press Club briefing in Washington, D.C. The report offers “a current look at progress and challenges in higher-education-based teacher preparation.” A few highlights from the report:

• Contrary to many perceptions, teacher preparation programs are admitting academically competitive candidates into their programs.
• Extensive clinical experiences are being incorporated in higher-education-based teacher preparation programs.
• Most teacher preparation programs collect data on their graduates but do not have access to state data.
• Teacher preparation programs are rising to the challenge of infusing technology into coursework.

I encourage you to read carefully the recent research of Kirabo Jackson, an economist from Northwestern University, who found that teachers whose VAM ratings were high were not the ones responsible for ensuring positive student outcomes on noncognitive measures, and vice versa.

Yes, education schools as well as alternative certification programs need to be accountable for producing graduates who are ready to teach. Ironically, no other profession assembles this kind of evidence—primarily because they don’t see it as useful. But professions like medicine and nursing assemble more concrete and helpful evidence—like the edTPA, developed by AACTE and Stanford University—to inform which programs are getting the job done, or not.
 
Lesson 3: Learn from top-performing nations—invest in clinical prep!
I just returned from observing the deliberations of ministers of education and teacher union leaders at the third annual International Summit on the Teaching Profession. All top-performing nations invest in teacher education—and second-tier countries like Germany are committing to placing more emphasis on preservice preparation of new recruits before instituting the kinds of teaching evaluation systems proliferating in the United States.

But most importantly, the governments of top-performing nations not only recruit top candidates, but they also pay full freight for extensive clinical preparation of them before allowing them to teach independently. There is no such thing as Teach for Finland or Teach for Singapore. And yesterday I learned that Cuba is already doing what we should be doing: creating a seamless system of teacher development that begins in university programs and continues in the form of long-term professional development in their K-12 schools.
 
Lesson 4: Universities are already preparing 21st-century teachers; why promote those that train only for the 20th century?
The AACTE report offers powerful examples from a number of institutes of higher education, including the University of Central Florida, California State University-Fresno, and the University of Cincinnati, whose education schools are preparing teachers to teach digital natives and second language learners—and also focus on global competencies. This is the real stuff of teacher education for today and tomorrow.
 
At the press conference, I asked why policymakers, and so many Inside-the-Beltway policy wonks, are so fascinated with shortcut alternative certification programs. These programs at best give future teachers an opportunity to teach students to pass muster on 20th-century standardized tests that are built on 19th-century principles of teaching and learning. We need alternative pathways into teaching, but not more truncated training regimes that undermine solid preparation.
 
And teachers themselves—like my teaching colleagues in the CTQ Collaboratory revealed in a powerful Education Week series—are speaking up about how and why our nation needs to ante up on the right kind of teacher preparation.
 
Our nation, because of low salaries, limited preparation, and poor working conditions, has to hire about 250,000 new teachers a year. Our nation’s policy leaders must think differently about how to invest in teacher education—especially considering the $1 billion raised (and spent) by Teach for America over the last five years to place a few thousand Teach for America recruits annually into our highest-needs schools. I have several action steps in mind, for both teacher educators and policymakers, which I will share in a follow-up post tomorrow.

Teacher Prep for the Digital Age

There is a lot of talk about improving teacher education in America. But much of the policy talk of late, especially in Washington, DC, would—at best—advance changes reflective of the late 20th century, not 2013.

Granted, there is more that can, and must, be done to evaluate teacher preparation, including the efforts of the National Science Foundation to devise a new system to ensure new teaching recruits are ready to teach in high-needs schools. But teachers must be able do far more than manage a classroom of diverse learners, implement research-based literacy and numeracy tools, and teach to standardized tests designed decades ago.

Reading reform reports, like the ones produced of late by the National Council for Teacher Quality (no relation to our CTQ), one might think that all teachers must only master 20th-century imperatives, but if we are going to create the profession that students deserve, then teacher preparation needs to transcend the debates of today.

I am proud that a team of 17 classroom experts, all part of the growing CTQ virtual community, has developed a framework for thinking and acting on Teacher Prep 2.0, with a hard look toward 3.0 (that will be fueled by the Semantic Web). I have incorporated a number of their ideas my presentation on Perspectives on the Future of Teacher Preparation in the Digital Age today at the Alliance for Excellent Education. (The webinar will be archived as a video—check the Alliance’s website later this week.)

These classroom experts believe it is time to get serious about fusing higher education and school district resources, coupled with serious federal incentive for recruiting, preparing, and retain teachers.  If targeted recruits were trained for hybrid teaching and leadership roles, with responsibility to work with colleagues in redesigned schools, then a variety of pathways into the profession could be embraced.

The vast majority of future teachers would be trained in cohort-based residencies, skilled in interdisciplinary teaching (think Common Core), and would know how to teach students and learn from colleagues in virtual networks. Performance assessments, not higher education seat time nor unstable valued-added test score results, would determine who was ready to teach what, when, and to whom.

But the team also believes it is time, especially for our most prestigious universities and research centers, to begin preparing a bold brand of teacher—the learning architect who focuses on personalized curricular experiences for students. Teachers become information integrators and surgical learning brokers—and teacherpreneurs who incubate and execute innovations. Specific teacherpreneur roles could include virtual PLC organizer, edugame developer, and boundary spanner for policy and pedagogical transformations.

These 17 pedagogical powerhouses recognize that excellent teacher education can be found today, even though it might not be recognized by the policy punditry of Washington, DC.  For example:

• Abilene Christian University in Texas focuses on performance assessments and peer-to-peer observations as teacher education professors get deeply involved in providing serious feedback on lesson design and instruction.
• West Virginia University prepared students in cohorts, where they learn to work collaboratively as they experience rural, urban, international, and virtual settings. 
• Stanford University ensures its graduates develop deep knowledge of research on teaching diverse students, including second language learners, as well as 21^st-century student assessments, much in the same way all new teachers are prepared in top-performing nations like Singapore and Finland.
• The American Colleges of Teacher Education (AACTE) is partnering with Stanford in creating the Teacher Performance Assessment (edTPA), designed to measure the readiness of teacher candidates. The edTPA looks like an assessment from the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, but is meant for novices as they engage in supervised clinical settings or internships. (And six states are already planning to adopt edTPA as part of its licensure requirements: Illinois, Minnesota, New York, Tennessee, Washington, and Wisconsin.)

These schools are harbingers of the future—and hope for transforming the teacher education system into one students deserve.

So it is time to think about cultivating teacher leaders who build and score new assessment tools tied to internationally benchmarked standards, integrating digital media into a more relevant curriculum for constantly wired students, and partnering with community organizations. It is time to think about preparing teacherpreneurs who blur the lines of distinction between those who teach in schools and those lead them.

Stay tuned for the upcoming release of the teacher team’s project, TEACHING 2030: Leveraging Teacher Preparation 2.0. We look forward to sharing it with you.

Finland Travel Log: Preparing Teachers for the Classroom

Below is the fifth in a series of posts I'm writing from Finland, as part of a trip with a delegation of U.S. education leaders. For a week, we're immersing ourselves in Finland's top-performing education system. (Read parts one, two, and three, and four for more reflections.)

Students at the Viikki Teacher Training School

Today’s focus has been on teacher education, and I have learned a lot--and have much to think about. With the U.S. delegation, I visited the Viikki Teacher Training School of the University of Helsinki. The training school serves almost 1,000 elementary, secondary, and upper secondary students and has 102 teachers who have been specially credentialed to prepare new teachers.

 

Jyrki Loima, administrative principal and professor at the university, explained the what, why, and how of the preparation of new recruits in his school. In his one-hour talk, he used the words “judgment” and “trust” a total of 38 times—such qualities are the basis of how teacher candidates are selected (in addition to a 100-item test that measures the ability to analyze research articles). Judgment and trust are also the foundation of how preservice teachers are trained and evaluated in tightly sequenced basic, applied, and advanced training programs.  

The Teacher Training School prepares 200 “student teachers” a year, which means that, combined with the 102 full teachers, there are 300 adults in a school building that works with only 1,000 children and teenagers—providing rich opportunities for both students and new recruits to the profession. The student teachers take pedagogical courses at Viikki, and record and analyze videos of lessons. A team of school and university faculty assesses the student teachers.

Perhaps most important, the teaching faculty at Viikki engage in a variety of research projects in collaboration with their university colleagues. Together, they study topics such as the effects of multi-language acquisition and the impact of various approaches to teacher education. And the 200 student teachers learn how to conduct research themselves, preparing to assemble evidence, develop and analyze formative assessments, and collaborate with colleagues. “Teachers have to make lots of decisions, and what they decide to do needs to be based on evidence of what works,” Professor Leena Krokfors told us.  

And we heard clearly from Pertti Kansanen, Emeritus Professor of Teacher Education, that “all of our graduates can justify their decisions.”

As we dug deeper at our University of Helsinki debrief, we explored the role that teacher education has on Finland’s extraordinary performance on PISA (Program for International Student Assessment). Here is what we talked about:

1. Finland selects teachers carefully, based on motivation, personality, and educability (related to the pedagogical skill they will have to master);
2. Research methods are part of every course future teachers take (“We research what we teach, and teach what we research”);
3. The university faculty conducts research on the effects of their efforts to prepare new teachers (identifying various learning patterns, resources, and challenges of learning and teaching);
4. Prospective teachers have more time to learn more deeply about how to teach their subjects differently; and
5. Faculty are developing new tools that allow teacher candidates to use new technologies to manage student learning.

And while the teacher education curriculum may look traditional “on paper,” there is a lot to be said for how it’s executed—and for the plans the university and school faculty have for the future. To prepare teachers for tomorrow’s schools, they’re developing modules that will include:

The University of Helsinki's HUB Magazine

 

1. Koulou 3.0: social media and “exploitation of blogs and wikis”
2. Second Life Viikki: virtual worlds and modeling
3. Kodu: game programming project
4. Sormet, Molla: projects involving tablet computers
5. Antivirus: a sick child’s right to education
6. Pietari ICE: collaborative project between Finland and St. Petersburg

And the university is proud of its decision to invest heavily in teacher education and future teachers—made visible by recently publishing three articles in its glossy magazine, HUB, focused on “Designing the Future.” As a city, Helsinki is all about design—and the university’s education school is right in the middle of it.

What the PDK/Gallup Poll Says About U.S. Education (And How It Compares to Finland)

I can’t help but consider my Finnish Lessons as I examine the latest PDK/Gallup poll about Americans’ attitudes toward education. Below I take on a few themes.

The Role of Curriculum in Teaching and Learning

There’s much to be encouraged about in the recent poll. The vast majority of Americans (75%), for example, think that the Common Core will provide more consistency in the quality of education.

The Common Core promises to frame more integrated and deeper learning opportunities for students. But I wonder if, in our implementation (or execution) of the Common Core, we will take a page out of the Finnish playbook. Finnish administrators and teachers embrace their national curriculum because it represents the nation’s educational values, rather than narrow prescriptions for learning. 

And, importantly, in Finland, teachers and principals are the ones who determine whether their students have met the standards.

Standardization vs. Professionalism

Most Americans say that a third of a teacher’s evaluation should be based on standardized tests. But when asked to list words that describe the teachers who had the most positive influence on them, Americans responded with words like “caring,” “encouraging,” and “attentive.” Those adjectives hardly coincide with the impersonal and stressful multiple-choice standardized tests students must take, regardless of background or ability level.

The Finns, primarily because they screen and prepare (not one or the other) each teacher so well, do not seem to care about teacher evaluation. They avoid the twisted contortions and gnashing of teeth over how to precisely use a value-added measure—based on one 20th-century standardized test—to determine 50 percent of a teacher’s effectiveness ratings.

After a couple of visits to Finnish schools, I can imagine how the Finns could leave every country behind in international measures of student achievement if they took professional development and evaluation more seriously—building on their trust of educators to make professional decisions about who is doing well and why.

But one thing is certain: Any teacher evaluation reforms in Finland would have to take into account that no one teacher is rarely, if ever, solely responsible for the education of a group (or even a class of students). It would be wise for U.S. policy to do the same.

Rating the Schools

Once again, the American public rates public schools very favorably—if they know them.

• 77% give an A or B grade to the school their eldest child attends
• 48% give an A or B grade to the schools in their communities
• 19% give an A or B  grade to the nation’s public schools as a whole

Less than half of Americans without kids in public schools have visited one in the past year. So you have to wonder—where are they getting their information?

Perhaps it was from a Newsweek cover story of late titled “Why We Must Fire Bad Teachers,” or from reformers like Joel Klein who claim that our schools, uniformly, are failing. In Finland, there are teachers who are not teaching effectively, and there are schools that are not great. But no one—including the Finnish media reporting on student matriculation exams—classifies teachers or schools as “bad” or “failures.”

In the United States, policymakers and business leaders often point to standardized tests as the metric for judging school success and teacher effectiveness. Not in Finland. As Risto E.J. Penttila, Secretary General of the Chamber of Commerce, told us today: “The purpose of our education system is to make good citizens.”  I suspect those Americans who know the public schools can see the work they’re doing in making good citizens.  They are the same Americans who characterize effective teachers as “caring.”

The Role of the Media

Looking at the PDK/Gallup poll results, there seems to be a discrepancy between Americans’ local, individual experiences with education, and broader perceptions of the system as a whole. When it comes to thinking about education on a national scale, we rely less on our own experiences and more on what the media reports.

And when the media focuses on what’s wrong with education rather than what’s right with education, it can be easy to make assumptions that skew negative. Our media doesn’t portray educators as a group as being a “caring,” “attentive,” or “encouraging” group.

Which makes it incredibly easy to fall into the trap of thinking that our positive experiences at our schools and our children’s schools are the exception, not the rule.

Along the same lines, the PDK/Gallup shows an uptick in support for using public dollars to send kids to private schools (44 percent were in favor in 2012, compared to 34 percent in 2011). However, how much media coverage shows side-by-side comparisons of student achievement in public vs. private and charter schools? In many cases, public schools still do a better job educating students, while at the same time educating all students.

Just as educators have a responsibility to their students, the media has a responsibility to cover not just hot-button issues that attract readers by causing alarm. We need to celebrate our teachers' and students' successes—not failures—so they can serve as a model in our profession and in our communities.

A Good Laugh--A Sigh--And a Revolutionary Suggestion

The Good Laugh

Did you catch Matthew Di Carlo’s perfect April Fools’ Day piece on “Measuring Journalist Quality”? Observing that journalists have been leading the way in “outing” teachers based on unreliable value-added measures (VAMs), Di Carlo flips the picture. What if journalists were measured by similarly unstable “reader-added models” (RAMs)?

The Sigh

Like all fine satire, Di Carlo’s piece carries serious heft.  

Many VAM systems determine teaching quality on the basis of a one-time estimate of a gain score based on students’ performance on a single multiple-choice, standardized test. And researchers have pointed out that even the most sophisticated value-added calculations produce substantial errors: as many as one in four teachers is misidentified as effective or ineffective.

In a recent study of VAM, Heather Hill, Laura Kapitula, and Kristin Umland warned: “Although we do recommend the use of value-added scores in combination with discriminating observation systems, evidence presented here suggests that value-added scores alone are not sufficient to identify teachers for reward, remediation, or removal.”

Sobering—especially when VAM systems are being used to make or break teachers’ reputations.

I’m cheered by the fact that the Measures of Effective Teaching project, sponsored by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, is assembling an array of measures that reflect the complexity of teaching. And Bill Gates, of late, has written his own eloquent plea for journalists to cease their “shameful” approach of using VAM rankings to identify which teachers are effective or not, irrespective of the rating’s accuracy.

Meanwhile, it’s important to note that teachers aren’t opposed to being held accountable. In fact, many teacher leaders we work with are eager for their profession to be more results-oriented.

Teachers are even open to VAM as an element of a comprehensive teacher development and evaluation system. What disturbs them is the idea of VAM as a predominant, automatic marker of their effectiveness—especially if today’s inadequate assessments are its basis.

The Revolutionary Suggestion

Our nation’s schools could cling to the limitations of VAMs, passing swift judgments based on questionable data. Or—prepare yourself for the revolutionary—we could invest in teacher leadership to develop a comprehensive teacher development and evaluation system. (A recent paper, commissioned by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, makes this argument.)

We could draw on the expertise of accomplished teachers to craft better student assessments, additional evaluation measures (like peer observation), and systems that support the professional growth of all teachers (whether in their first year or their twentieth).  

Teachers are well-suited to inform teacher development and evaluation. They understand the nuances of the work they do each day—and can help create equally nuanced systems for gauging and supporting teaching effectiveness. They grasp the complexity of their profession.

Do we get a Day-After-April-Fools’-Day wish? If so, here’s mine: that more journalists grasp the complexity of teaching (and the potential of teacher leadership, too).

Why Improvement Efforts Often Fall Short (Despite Good Intentions)

This post originally appeared on the Silicon Valley Education Foundation's blog, Thoughts on Public Education.

Recently, I visited innovative charter schools in the Bay Area. At one school, physical spaces and teachers’ schedules are designed to encourage collaboration. Another school involves community organizations and parents in student learning during and after the school day. One is well stocked with technology. At another, teachers take on leadership roles.

And yet, everywhere I looked I noticed elements that didn’t quite connect. I saw missed opportunities to boost student learning. One of the schools gestured toward important ideas, but because of the lack of experienced teacher leaders, missed the mark when it came to implementing them. The other one greatly valued teacher leaders, but still had a long way to go in spreading teaching expertise from one classroom to another.

This points to a truth that is tough for reformers to swallow: America’s schools will be transformed only when we tackle the complexities of teaching and learning. We can’t rely on isolated policies or initiatives to sustain a highly functioning school. Few, if any, innovations can be implemented successfully over time unless other interlocking set of elements are in place—connected by  collaboration (not competition) among universities, school districts, charter networks, and nonprofits.

What I saw

So where do we start? Here are two situations I observed during my investigation:

• School A is known for “blended learning.” Yet there was little pedagogical coherence between how teachers taught in a regular classroom and how students were expected to learn in a high-tech lab staffed by low-cost tutors. School A teachers, who tended to have only a few years of experience and little clinical preparation, had limited interaction with the lab tutors. It was unclear whether many teachers were familiar with the technological tools so central to their school’s identity.

• School B is known for hiring new recruits who have extensive clinical preparation. Teachers know how to differentiate instruction and work with second language learners. But School B’s teachers did not always know how to effectively analyze student learning data and needed more training in how to use the collaborative planning time wisely provided to them (approximately two hours a day).

What would help connect the dots in these schools – and all schools? Teacher preparation programs could lead the way by readying pre-service teachers for a transformed public school system.

Accountability for teacher preparation programs

Recently, U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan noted that too many education schools are “not up to the job.” He highlighted recruitment and accountability as key areas for improvement, and noted that few of today’s programs offer “rigorous, clinical experience that prepares future teachers for the realities of today’s diverse classrooms.”

And then there are the emergent realities of tomorrow’s classrooms—which few teacher preparation programs are adequately addressing. For example, tomorrow’s teachers will likely need to teach students who are “digital natives,” spread their expertise to colleagues through collaboration and leadership, connect families with community resources, and develop and use sophisticated assessments to measure student progress.

The federal government should hold teacher preparation programs accountable – but should look at more than the twentieth-century standardized tests currently in place. For example, what if teacher preparation programs (whether university-based or “alternative”) were judged on how long their graduates remained in the classroom, working effectively as leaders in schools and communities? What if programs were assessed on how well their graduates used student data to improve instruction? What if the accountability system considered graduates’ abilities to provide effective blended learning opportunities?

My organization, the Center for Teaching Quality, works with thousands of teachers nationwide to improve the teaching profession and our nation’s schools. Later this month, talented teachers who are part of our Bay Area New Millennium Initiative team will release a report with specific recommendations about how to ensure new teachers are ready for their roles. Watch for it!

How Teachers Will Rock the News in 2012

I may not always agree with Rick Hess—but there’s no doubt that his blog posts are worthy of attention. In “Ten Edu-Stories We’ll Be Reading in 2012,” Rick predicts headlines for the coming year. He foresees increased skepticism of Race To The Top reforms and Khan Academy’s video-based model of education. He anticipates GOP presidential nominees abandoning attacks on public education in a “push for moderates.”

While Rick claims to be a lousy prognosticator, his list is intriguing.

But what’s absent in his list is any mention of teachers. None. Zero. Nada.

This is surprising because teachers have been the coin of the education policy realm for fifteen years or so. Few researchers (or reformers, for that matter) dispute the impact that improved teaching can have on student outcomes. Home and family factors are powerful influences on student achievement, but teachers matter.

So I’m offering my own version of Rick’s list. Sure, it may be optimistic—but we can hope, right?

5] Presidential Candidates Talk Up Teachers. President Obama and GOP presidential hopefuls realize that one in 100 Americans are teachers. Candidates focus less on “getting rid of bad teachers” and more on the positive: preparing and supporting teachers to do their best work.

4] USDOE Spreads Teaching Expertise. Acknowledging the uneven implementation of Race To The Top efforts, the USDOE adjusts its strategies. Rather than merely identifying effective teachers, officials promote strategies to elevate those teachers as leaders and spread their expertise to peers.

3] Policymakers Ask Accomplished Teachers for ESEA Help. Policymakers realize ESEA reauthorization is not in the cards for 2012. They turn to accomplished teachers, including former state and national teachers of the year, to help build public demand for improving the law. The teachers emphasize that the law must build capacity in high-need schools and districts—not just punish them.

2] Reformers Improve Bricks-and-Clicks Model. The Khan Academy’s “flipped” classroom model fails to yield the results reformers have been expecting—especially for at-risk students. In response, reformers invest more in innovative roles for teachers as community organizers, virtual mentors, and connectors to social services.

1] Obama Elevates National Board Certified Teachers. While GOP nominee Mitt Romney highlights TFA recruits who teach for two-year stints, President Obama points to National Board Certified Teachers as committed, accomplished standard bearers for school reform.

Now, I'd rather bet on my favorite college football team (Go Gamecocks!) than wager for the accuracy of this list.

But if we want to get serious about college and career readiness for all kids, the education conversation must shift. We must talk about what it takes to recruit, prepare, and support effective teachers. And I fervently hope that the “we” who are talking are not just the same old chatterers: policymakers, reformers, pundits. I hope that “we” also includes our nation’s most accomplished teachers—whose untapped expertise could transform our public schools.  

Preparing Teachers for Schools We Want

By Kristoffer Kohl 

Kristoffer Kohl is a former classroom teacher working currently as a policy associate at CTQ to further the vision of TEACHING 2030. He previously collaborated with a team of accomplished teachers to produce the report “Transforming School Conditions: Building Bridges to the Education System that Students and Teachers Deserve.” 

During recent visits to a few schools known for their innovative practices, I was struck by one school leader who lamented, “We are not preparing teachers for the schools that we want; we are preparing teachers for the same schools we’ve had for years.”

By the time teachers have gone through the traditional channels to become instructional experts, they are indeed experts when it comes to school—old school.

Malcolm Gladwell refers to it as the 10,000-hour rule. We prefer to call it the 15,000-hour problem. Regardless of how you identify it, there are some strong forces tugging against innovation in our classrooms.

In his book Outliers, Gladwell posits that expertise in any field comes after 10,000 hours spent working at it. From Bill Gates writing code at his high school’s computer to the Beatles playing marathon gigs in Hamburg, Germany, before taking the world by storm, Gladwell presents an entertaining argument for those hours you spent practicing piano.

Unfortunately, this equation works in both directions. As Seth Godin points out, there are plenty of bands playing 10,000 hours of subpar music. Long hours may help you become an expert, but they won’t ensure that you’ll make it to the top of the charts.

Such is the rub for educators.

The average high school graduate attends public school for 13 years, amounting to nearly 15,000 hours. Tacking on another five years for undergraduate education and credentialing before becoming licensed leaves incoming teachers with nearly 20,000 hours spent in a classroom.

Each year’s newest class of teachers is freshly minted in the ways of yesterday’s schools. They are experts two times over in the way they view their instruction, classroom, school, and most important, their position in the education hierarchy. While preservice programs endeavor mightily to equip teachers with the latest research-based strategies, it is difficult to fight what has been ingrained so deeply.

I visited another school renowned for its blended learning structure. There, students in the learning lab were completing digital versions of multiple-choice tests. A worksheet with lipstick is still just a worksheet. Despite the wave of complex, educational gaming software sweeping across our digital devices and making Oregon Trail look like the Model T, even some of the more “advanced” school models struggle to internalize that learning is as much about the process as it is about the content.

Fortunately, there is a growing number of educators breaking from the moorings of the past and logging smarter hours with students. As in any field, innovation comes from craftsmen who experiment with their practices on a regular basis. The flipped classroom gained recognition for reconceiving our notion of instructional time, but I’m also thinking of teachers like Bill Ferriter and Marsha Ratzel who have explicitly built novel learning experiences into their instruction.

What elements of your 20,000 hours have you left in the past?

USDOE Sends Mixed Messages on Teacher Education

Just recently, the U.S. Department of Education released its plan for teacher-education reform, pointing out that too many university-based programs “do not provide teachers with a rigorous, clinical experience that prepares them for the schools in which they will work.”

In an ironic twist, however, the Department’s Race to the Top guidelines have promoted the proliferation of alternative certification programs that shortcut pre-service training for new recruits. These programs give recruits limited or non-existent opportunities for “rigorous, clinical” preparation prior to teaching independently. Not only must university-based teacher education be improved, but we also need to think about what supports teachers are given while they're teaching. There is no reason to believe that school districts are sufficiently suited to prepare teachers for the schools of today — or tomorrow, for that matter.

A recent study has shown that few teachers receive the “intensive, sustained, and content-focused professional development” that matters for student achievement. For example, as reported in the same study, over the course of a year only 9 percent of elementary math teachers had more than 24 hours of content-specific professional development in math. Many school-district officials just don’t value the kind of high-quality professional development that teachers (and their students) deserve. Instead, as seen in this stark display below (from a local news report on how school districts view teacher learning), archaic district-driven professional development prevails.

From the Jackson (MS) Clarion-Ledger, Oct. 17, 2011

I wonder why USDOE officials, in pushing for much-needed changes in teacher education, don’t push school districts to transform their systems of professional development. The plan does indeed call for all teachers — including veteran teachers and recent graduates of preparation programs — to “receive professional development and career advancement opportunities that are aligned with their identified strengths and needs.”

However, USDOE does not call for scrutiny of school districts’ professional development programs. Maybe districts should be held accountable for the quality of support they provide to recently minted teacher-education graduates. Maybe if the USDOE called for such scrutiny, our nation would get a bit closer to creating the kind of comprehensive teacher-development system needed for the schools of today and tomorrow. 

Six Ways to Improve Teacher Prep Programs

Below is a blog post I wrote as part of an online discussion for Learning Matters, a nonprofit media production company that has produced many education-focused reports and documentaries for PBS. Along with several experts in the education field, I was asked to write about teacher quality and teacher training. I encourage you to read the other participants' responses and leave comments on the full Learning Matters discussion — it's absolutely worth the read.

 

Recently, I collaborated with twelve expert teachers to write TEACHING 2030: What We Must Do For Our Students and Our Public Schools … Now and in the Future. We argue that universities’ teacher education programs — and highly-touted alternative certification programs like Teach for America — perpetuate out-of-date models of teaching and learning.

Teacher recruits need a very different kind of preparation to teach the diverse, tech-savvy learners of today and to ready those learners for the 21st-century global marketplace. To make this happen, we must move far beyond reform rhetoric — and we must do so quickly. Here are six big strategies that can help teacher preparation programs break the mold:

1. Ensure that recruits are being prepared for the roles that are most needed in area schools: School districts should develop “labor market” reports, allowing universities to carefully consider how many recruits should be prepared and for what.

2. Jettison traditional three-hour course credits in favor of performance-based pedagogical modules and assessments: This nimble, practical approach will help recruits to develop specific teaching skills and will better identify who is ready to teach, when, and under what conditions.

3. Split the time: Work with school districts to create hybrid roles for the most effective teachers to spend half their time teaching and half their time as lead teacher educators.

4. Understand the community: Require recruits to complete a substantial internship in a community-based organization, developing deep knowledge of how and where students and their families live.

5. Embrace online: Engage recruits in a virtual network of teachers, preparing them to teach effectively online and to collaborate virtually with teaching colleagues.

6. Emergent Tech: Work with school districts to expose recruits to live and digitally recorded “lesson studies,” in which teams of candidates learn to critique teaching and assess student learning using emerging technologies.

Reshaping the Teacher Preparation Debate

A few days ago, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan gave a shout-out to the University of Michigan for serving as a national model for “reinventing” education schools. Indeed, the UM education school, led by Dean Deborah Ball, has done much to recalibrate university-based preparation programs by focusing on the practical how-tos of teaching specific curricular content and drawing on new research about how students learn. And though Secretary Duncan has often called for more student teaching, not less, his Race to the Top policies continue to embrace shortcut alternative-certification programs. Such routes, like Teach for America, can’t come close to offering new recruits the kind of preparation provided by UM’s education school (or by the many other university preparation programs that have also overhauled their approaches).

Secretary Duncan’s contradictory stances on teacher training are difficult to reconcile.

I keep thinking back to a terrific conversation captured by Education Next a few years ago. Arthur Wise, a champion for professionalizing teaching, and Julie Mikuta, a TFA alum and partner in the NewSchools Venture Fund, discussed the merits of university-based and alternative-certification approaches to teacher preparation. The three-year-old piece brings to light a number of issues surrounding TFA and whether it’s a “valuable strategy for recruiting the best and brightest into education and energizing school improvement, or a distraction and a device for sending ill-prepared neophytes to serve some of the nation’s neediest students.”

Federal policymakers have much to learn from the Education Next conversation – especially from Dr. Wise, who points to the false dichotomies often promoted in the current policy debates over teacher education. Rather than demonizing TFA or claiming teacher education programs have it all figured out, he calls for a strategy that scaffolds learning for all novices, whether they are TFA members or university-based recruits. He envisions a “teaching team strategy” in which experienced teachers are ultimately responsible for students, “but in multiple classrooms and with the assistance of the novices.”

Both TFA and traditional recruits have much to contribute to the process of improving teaching and learning. No teacher, however, should teach independently until he or she has passed muster on performance metrics, including teaching diverse learners (such as ELL students) and using sophisticated assessment tools to determine student progress toward 21st-century academic standards. It’s time that our nation’s education leaders learn that teacher education and licensing is not about dichotomous choices, but inventive approaches that can support student learning today and tomorrow.

 

Steven Brill Does a 180: Teachers and Unions Can Save Our Schools

This guest post is by Kristoffer Kohl, a former classroom teacher who recently joined the Center for Teaching Quality as a policy associate working toward the vision of TEACHING 2030. He previously worked with a team of accomplished teachers from across the country to produce “Transforming School Conditions: Building Bridges to the Education System that Students and Teachers Deserve.”

The clamor for education reform continues on the pages of the Wall Street Journal, but not in the manner you might think. Rather than calling for vouchers, charter schools, and an end to collective bargaining, guest columnist Steven Brill suggests that the solution for saving our schools will be found in the skill and leadership of so-called ordinary teachers and the unions who represent them.

In an essay that appeared in Saturday’s print edition, Brill, author of Class Warfare: Inside the Fight to Fix America's Schools, dispels some of the myths that have informed faulty proposals for fixing public education. With 50 million students in 95,000 public schools, we cannot charter-school our way to meaningful reform, nor can we rely on the unsustainable model of super-teachers working endless hours at a tireless pace. In a profession numbering over three million, it is the “rank and file” that must be mobilized for actual reform to take root. Brill nods to the profound role that organized labor will play in the process by adding, “The unions are the organizational link that will enable school improvement to expand beyond the ability of extraordinary people to work extraordinary hours.”

I could not agree more. Teaching is the nation’s largest college-educated occupation, and we need millions of teachers to work together over time in their communities (and in and out of cyberspace) to serve students and families well. As Gary Sykes and Dick Elmore suggested decades ago, it is time to build a school system in which ordinary people can do the extraordinary work of education.

As a Teach for America alum who taught in Las Vegas for almost five years, I can attest to the need to focus on the working conditions that allow teachers to teach effectively.

As the Center for Teaching Quality continues to evolve, we are working with teachers to rethink what it means to “organize” as a profession. We encourage unions to set aside their past rules and tools (which won them much-needed concessions from reluctant administrators) to become professional guilds. Transformed in this way, unions could enforce teaching standards among the ranks and broker the kind of teacherpreneurial efforts needed for 21^st-century schools.

In the post-industrial age, teachers need professional organizations that defend not only their rights but their profession’s commitment to high standards, the interests of children, and a public education system that protects American democracy and spreads the expertise of its most effective practitioners.

Imagine if teachers were to earn differentiated membership into their unions based on the quality of their teaching. Imagine union leaders selected for their classroom expertise as well as their leadership skills and organizational prowess. How might such a leadership structure dramatically alter the voice that unions have in the reform debate?

As recent survey results from the Gallup/PDK Poll on public education demonstrate, the American public trusts teachers and believes they should have the flexibility to teach in the ways they think best without being tied to a prescribed curriculum. Likewise, we should trust the perspective of teachers and demand a meaningful role for them when big decisions are being made about education in this country. Too often, education policy is crafted by those who have never taught in a classroom. With the nation’s best teachers informing policy decisions, legislative mandates would be driven by the realities and challenges of our schools.

Our New Millennium Initiative teachers in Colorado (part of a larger network that includes communities in Washington, Illinois, Florida, and California) are promoting a series of innovative solutions related to implementation of the state’s teacher evaluation legislation, SB 191, also known as the Ensuring Quality Instruction Through Educator Effectiveness Act.  In his new book, Brill describes the Colorado law as landmark legislation. However, SB 191 and similar laws will fail unless we use new technologies and organizational structures that equip expert teachers to implement high quality teaching evaluation systems.

It is reassuring to hear that Steven Brill has opened up the conversation a bit more for teachers to lead the way.

A Public Education Success Story Silenced

Well, it’s happened again. Shortsighted policymakers have axed a research-based program that has proven effective in preparing high-quality teachers.

Parents and schools in North Carolina should mourn the loss of the North Carolina Teaching Fellows.  The program, in place for almost 25 years, recruits top high school students into teaching, pays for their high quality preparation (with extensive student teaching), and supports them in their initial years so they remain in the classroom for a career, not just for a couple of years.

According to yesterday's News & Observer, the NC Teaching Fellows program costs the state a modest $13.5 million a year. It produces more than 500 top-flight new teachers annually, well-prepared in both content and pedagogy, who commit to teaching in the state for at least four years. Some 17 campuses participate in the program.

Who are these Teaching Fellows? The typical recruit has a SAT score over 1100, a high school GPA of 4.0 or higher on a weighted scale, and is in the top 10% of his or her high school graduating class. Each year approximately 20% of the program's recipients are minority, while 30% are male.  As reported in the news article, Jason Sinquefield, a 26-year-old math teacher, noted that he “never thought of education as a career choice” until he discovered the NC Teaching Fellows. He credited the program with defining “a way of becoming the best teacher you could be.”

The program’s results are impressive. A recent study by a researcher at the University of North Carolina found that Teaching Fellows are more likely to produce gains on student achievement tests, particularly in elementary and middle grades math, and in high school. The Teaching Fellows are far more likely than other teachers (especially those from alternative certification programs) to remain in the classroom for five years.

And these positive results are longstanding. Over 15 years ago I had the opportunity to assess the impact of the NC Teaching Fellows Program. At the time, tools were not available to examine student achievement effects. However, I found that administrators highly valued these well-prepared, university-trained recruits, who quickly became change agents for long-term school improvement. Today, almost 4,000 Teaching Fellows are teaching in 99 of the state’s 100 counties. Nearly one in four have earned National Board Certification.

They are effective teachers — and specialized recruitment and training made a difference. So why’d this program get cut? Times are tight, of course. But some of the North Carolina state legislators who took the budget ax to the program seem to be influenced by rhetoric that devalues investments in teacher education and professional development.

Ironically, the death of the NC Teaching Fellows program comes as many of our nation’s business and community leaders are calling for our nation to invest more in teachers. The North Carolina Teaching Fellows program employs many of the same strategies that help top-ranked nations to ensure the quality of their teaching workforces. As Linda Darling-Hammond described recently, nations like Singapore and Finland have built a high-performing teaching profession by enabling all of their teachers to enter high-quality preparation programs, generally at the masters’ degree level, where they receive a salary while they prepare. There they learn research-based teaching strategies and train with experts in model schools attached to their universities. They enter a well-paid profession – in Singapore earning as much as beginning doctors -- where they are supported by mentor teachers and have 15 or more hours a week to work and learn together, engaging in shared planning, action research, lesson study, and observations in each other’s classrooms. And they work in schools that are equitably funded and well-resourced with the latest technology and materials.

Obviously, all of these elements are not yet in place in American schools. But in North Carolina, a small state program has managed to take some significant steps to ensure a truly qualified cadre of public school teachers. Over the course of more than two decades, the North Carolina Teaching Fellows program has fine-tuned its strategies and demonstrated its effectiveness. Shame on North Carolina policymakers for bringing this all-too-rare success story to an untimely end.

Preparing Teachers for Long-Term Success

 

“In school time, two years is a blip on the screen."

Anna L. Martin’s recent series of short essays on The Answer Sheet do highlight problems with the Teach For America (TFA) model. But Anna’s pieces also offer an astute perspective on how the teaching profession can better fulfill the hopes of the students and families she serves. 

A TFA alum and bright young teacher working with our New Millennium Initiative, Anna is now in her seventh year of teaching at the school where she was initially placed. While her essays touch on the need for better preparation for TFA recruits, Anna focuses instead on a central point: any model that imagines a two-year life cycle for teachers is problematic.

Anna rightfully acknowledges that she might never have entered the classroom without TFA, while offering several observations about the weaknesses of the two-year cycle. What schools really need, Anna argues, are teachers who have truly mastered their craft—and who are deeply embedded in and committed to their school communities.

She points out, “Building relationships and creating a collaborative environment conducive to the kind of educational outcomes achieved by high-performing districts and countries outside the United States takes time… In a weird way, TFA seems almost to be supporting, rather than dismantling, the idea that excellent teachers are widgets — easily replaceable, easily replicable.”

Rich lessons abound in Anna’s firsthand account of what it’s like to work in a school with high turnaround—about 30% of her school’s employee base is dedicated to TFA placement. We learn about the promising young people—like Anna—who are attracted to teaching by TFA’s recruitment strategies. We learn about missed opportunities—for teachers to learn from their more experienced peers, for students and families to be served by teachers who know their communities well, and for bright, hard-working TFA alumni to develop as teacher leaders within their placement schools.

I am proud to have gotten to know Anna thanks to her involvement in our virtual Teacher Leaders Network as well as our New Millennium Initiative — powerful groups of young teachers in sites nationwide who are developing solutions for some of the most vexing problems of the teaching profession.

Here’s what is impressive to me about Anna’s essays. She provides an informed critique that emphasizes the factors that matter for students’ success. She sees that neither TFA or education schools (at least as they are designed today) has adequately addressed the needs of all students. Moving past this false dichotomy (teacher education schools vs. alternative routes) is essential to improving teaching effectiveness.

Anna and other Bay Area New Millennium Initiative team members will soon release a potent policy paper on the future of teaching. Their concrete suggestions (generated after extensive research and debate and grounded in classroom experience) address many of the key issues Anna highlights in her short essays: preparing teachers for long-term success, providing high-quality professional development on the job, and reshaping the career paths available to talented teachers. 

Wise policymakers—those who recognize the importance of developing and keeping extraordinary teachers—should listen carefully to the ideas of teacher leaders like Anna. She is not alone. We are in touch with thousands of teachers across the United States who are deeply committed to their profession but recognize that bold changes will be necessary to meet the needs of 21^st-century learners.

 

Redefining Teacher Preparation

Is America finally ready to invest in teaching?

The question looms.

Last month, I sat in on the International Summit on the Teaching Profession in New York. Participants included education ministers and union leaders from high-performing nations as well as American education leaders (Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, NEA president Dennis Van Roekel, and AFT president Randi Weingarten).

Andreas Schliecher, a researcher at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), offered a compelling analysis of countries with high-performing students (and narrowing achievement gaps).  What do these countries have in common? They invest in teaching as a knowledge-based profession. Teacher preparation is serious business: top-notch recruits are paid to prepare for a teaching career. 

American teacher education policy is very different—and yields poorer results for students. Our policies promote short-cut, low-quality preparation for entry into the teaching profession. There is often little connection between pre-service preparation and on-the-job support. New recruits have few incentives to receive serious training before they teach, and they are not rewarded for remaining in the classroom.

TEACHING 2030, which I co-authored with twelve accomplished teachers, presses American policymakers to invest in better teacher education for tomorrow’s students. (The image at left is taken from graphic facilitator Sunni Brown's depiction of a recent 2030 team conversation.) Relying on classroom expertise as well as research on best practices, we developed a vision of a great teacher preparation system: 

1.    Universities, school districts, and non-profits will fuse their resources to prepare future teachers;

2.   Teacher preparation will be built on a sound liberal arts education — then candidates can choose from various tracks of professional preparation, each one focusing on different roles and responsibilities;

3.   Teacher education will be cohort-based, preparing new recruits to teach as teams in high-need schools;

4.   All new teachers will complete a substantial internship in a community-based organization in order to develop deep knowledge of the context of how and where students and their families live;

5.   All new recruits for a teaching career will be expected to serve in an extensive internsh ip in a virtual teacher network, where they also learn specific skills in using multi-user virtual environments to educate students anytime, anywhere, as well as how to spread expertise among teaching colleagues;

6.   Pedagogical preparation will be built on a mixed use of live and digitally recorded “lesson studies” in which teams of candidates learn to critique teaching and assess student learning using emerging technologies;

 7.   Each teacher education candidate will have a program of learning with common tasks to accomplish and performance assessments to measure when (and what) they are ready to teach;

8.   Passing performance assessments, not completing “seat time” in college courses, will determine when teachers are ready to teach independently – and in what schools and under what conditions;

9.   Teaching responsibilities (and differential compensation) will be determined on the basis of what one knows and can do as an independently practicing teacher (identified through performance assessments) and one’s proven knowledge and skills; and

10.   Schools will be red esigned for teacher learning (as in other high-performing nations) so new recruits can develop under the supervision of expert vete rans who have been specially prepared as mentors. 

This is the future of teacher education we envision — one that will ensure equity and excellence for all students. American students and schools will only be able to catch up to (and surpass) other nations’ educational systems through dramatic transformation of its teacher preparation policies. To learn more, order a copy of TEACHING 2030.

Bold indicators - for the 20th century

The Center for American Progress and the Education Trust have published a policy brief focusing on the "essential elements" of teacher policy they believe must be present in the reauthorization of ESEA.

Problem is — they left out some of the essentials.

Their policy prescriptions earnestly address the 20th century problems that so many policy wonks seem determined to fix, whether or not they still have much relevance. Here in the second decade of the 21st century, the CAP/Ed Trust proposed ESEA indicators often miss the mark. They ignore important research on the conditions that will allow teachers to teach effectively in the new millennium and thus assure that all students have access to expert teachers every day.

Here are a five examples of inadequate indicators.

CAP and Ed Trust call for mandates requiring states to collect and report on:

1. The percentage of teachers beyond their first year of teaching. But they disregard the fact that high-needs schools require teachers with at least 4-5 years under their belt -- the point at which classroom teachers develop a more finely tuned practice.

2. The percentage of course sections taught by in-field secondary teachers. But they ignore that many administrators mindlessly shift elementary teachers from grade to grade without any consideration of their training and experience.

3. The percentage of teachers prepared by a high-performing teacher preparation program. But they overlook the fact that ineffective teachers can graduate from "effective pathways" without ever having to demonstrate that they are competent.

4. The percentage of teachers with fewer than ten absences. But they fail to account for poor working conditions (e.g., like inept administrators) that may be undermining teachers' capacity to teach effectively.

5. The percentage of teachers in the top quartile of teacher impact on student growth. But without recognizing the instability of the current statistical models, the narrow range of testing data available, and the need to use all data in more measured and non-mechanical ways.

Most important, none of their proposals call for states to collect evidence on the spread of effective teaching by expert practitioners, in and out of cyberspace. This is how schools improve.  If we are going to create the kind of teaching development system students deserve, we must have indicator systems that align with today's school realities — indicators that will actually drive the changes we must have to create a high performing, results-oriented teaching profession across the board.

Tom Friedman Has Some of It Right – But He Needs to Do a Little More Homework

Tom Friedman’s op-ed piece in last Saturday’s New York Times suggests that it's time for policymakers to get serious about teaching in America. Friedman calls for emulating the teacher development systems of Finland and Denmark that have transformed teaching from a factory-line job to a knowledge profession by investing “massively” in how teachers are recruited, prepared, and rewarded. So far, so good.

Friedman then goes on to praise Race to the Top investments by the Obama Administration, while bemoaning the perceived failure of our schools to teach "the ability to do critical thinking and problem-solving; the ability to communicate effectively; and the ability to collaborate." Yet many accomplished teachers who are eager to teach in ways that build just these skills are complaining that Obama's R2T investments continue support for a narrow, test-driven curriculum that discourages time-consuming strategies like project-based instruction — the very kind of teaching that requires students to work together and apply what they are learning to solve authentic problems.

Friedman apparently does not yet know that high performing nations invest in teachers in much different ways than those prescribed by America’s current federal policies. Top-scoring nations like Finland invest in:
 
1. Teacher education, so that all recruits have extensive preparation, fully paid by the federal government, in a wide array of relevant pedagogical strategies, before they begin to teach;

2. Good professional working conditions, so that all teachers have up to 50% of their time devoted to working with each other on assessing student progress, refining their lessons, and developing new pedagogical skills; and

3. Purposeful student assessment systems, so that teachers always know whether students are learning what we've agreed they need to learn, and what to do next if they are not.

It's true that the USDOE has recently invested about $160 million in the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium, in an attempt to build better student assessments that will recognize and promote quality teaching. However, very little of the R2T's $4 billion in "change dollars" actually pushes states to invest in serious teacher education, including provocative new approaches proposed by those who teach. Instead the focus is on alternative certification that truncates training.The R2T framework, which continues to promote 20th century reform strategies,  also does very little to help educators and other leaders focus on the future of learning and the need to transform teaching practice to meet the needs of students "growing up digital." 

I think that Mr. Friedman, an erudite observer of the global economy, senses the need to finally professionalize teaching in America. I hope he'll take the time to become more fully informed about what other competitive nations are doing to build a 21st century teaching profession — and the steps we need to take to do the same.

"They will have to do what any good teacher does..."

Saturday’s New York Times brought us a fascinating article on robot technology and teaching. In their piece Benedict Carey and John Markoff describe the cutting-edge developments underway where “highly programmed machines” with motion tracking and speech recognition tools can engage humans and “rival” some teaching tasks. In one investigation, reported in the NYT article, a robot named “RUBI” was found to significantly improve the vocabulary of two handfuls of toddlers.

No doubt artificial intelligence can greatly enhance learning opportunities for the growing diversity of students entering our public schools. So many other industries and professions —whether in automobile manufacturing or in medicine —increasingly are investing in technology to enhance productivity and advance professional practice.

But as one executive of a company that makes a remotely controlled robot made perfectly clear: “The problem with autonomous machines is that people are so unpredictable, especially children” and “it’s impossible to anticipate everything that can happen” in a classroom. As Carey and Markoff note, “If robots are to be truly effective guides…they will have to do what any good teacher does: learn from students when a lesson is taking hold and when it is falling flat.”

If you do not quite get this point, just turn to another piece in the Saturday edition of the Times, pointing to the large growth in Teach for America — a high-profile effort to recruit recent young graduates of top-flight universities, who receive only a few weeks of basic training before they enter some of the nation’s highest needs schools. Here’s what reporter Michael Winerip writes about Lilianna Nguyen, a recent Stanford graduate, who is struggling to teach a sixth-grade math class about negative numbers.

(Liliana) prepared definitions to be copied down, but the projector was broken. She’d also created a fun math game, giving every student an index card with a number. They were supposed to silently line themselves up from lowest negative to highest positive, but one boy kept disrupting the class, blurting out, twirling his pen, complaining he wanted to play a fun game, not a math game. 



“Why is there talking?” Ms. Nguyen said. “There should be no talking.” 



“Do I have to play?” asked the boy. 



“Do you want to pass summer school?” Ms. Nguyen answered. 



The boy asked if it was O.K. to push people to get them in the right order. 



“This is your third warning,” Ms. Nguyen said. “Do not speak out in my class.”

This is where the nuance of knowing your students well as individuals and having a deep understanding of child development, sociological interactions in a classroom, and behavior management — as well as varied pedagogical techniques in math — makes the difference in what gets learned. And no robot can do it all. Nor can an ill-prepared and under-supported teacher.

We need Ms. Nguyen and thousands more like her, but we need them and those who support them to make a full commitment to the preparation, support and ongoing professional development it takes to become an excellent teacher.

Is the quality teacher-prep message finally getting through?

In the recent round of federal Teacher Quality Partnership (TQP) grants, several urban teacher residencies won major awards. Awardees included the Boston Teacher Residency, the Denver Teacher Residency, and University of Chicago's Urban Teacher Education Program.

The Boston residency program, with $15 million TQP dollars, will now recruit and prepare more than 540 teachers, who will train for more than a year and emerge with expertise in either working with second language learners or special needs students.

The Denver Teacher Residency, in partnership with the University of Denver (DU), also won a substantial award to focus on “growing” teachers from its own community – individuals who have the cultural competence to teach the district’s diverse students and are willing to teach more than a couple of years (unlike many other alternative certification recruits that have been hired recently). While policy pundits dismiss the need for teachers to earn advanced degrees (and higher pay), DTR promotes an 18-month Master’s degree in Curriculum and Instruction, coupled with a two-year induction program.

In the last round of TQP funding, UCLA and its highly touted Center X, in partnership with LAUSD Local District 4 and the Los Angeles Small Schools Center, are developing a powerful model for teacher education for high needs schools. The UCLA effort will pay very close attention to preparing teachers to work with second language learners (with a focus on theories of language structure, acquisition, and development) and on the resources necessary to provide low-cost housing to teacher recruits within the communities they serve. UCLA-trained residents are expected to conduct research into their practice to inform their own development and to assist the program in evaluating its effectiveness.

Could residencies — urban and rural — serve as harbingers of the teacher leaders needed for 21st century schools? Is it possible there may be a movement afoot to take teacher education seriously? Will our nation get over its dysfunctional infatuation with short-cut training? Stay tuned.

No doubt too many traditional education schools are not getting the job done, but neither are alternatives that offer miniscule training for teachers who teach for a short time, while lulling many policymakers into a sense of false security about the quality of the teacher supply lines.

Understanding the Source of Effective Teaching

Guest blog by Alesha Daughtrey, CTQ Research and Policy Associate, and Ali Kliegman, CTQ Policy Assistant

With the reauthorization of ESEA looming, the debates over how to measure teacher effectiveness are heating up. Pundits and education reform leaders increasingly call for disbanding university-based teacher education and state certification regimes in favor of recruiting talented individuals from competitive colleges with the right “personality” or dispositions to teach effectively.

A January 2010 article in Atlantic Monthly by Amanda Ripley cited a variety of individual characteristics that a new Teach for America study associates with effective teaching. Many of these (such as Ivy League diplomas and personal “grit”) cannot be taught to or supported in developing teachers. Thus, proponents of these positions suggest that—contrary to conclusions supported by rigorous research—there is little that schools or preparation programs can do to improve teaching effectiveness.

It was surprising, therefore, that the article highlighted the effective teaching of William Taylor, a product of an education school where he was “well prepared” and ready to culturally connect to the students he is teaching. He, like other superstar teachers identified in the TFA study, “constantly reevaluates what [he is] doing.” But that means teachers have to know what they are doing, and have access to a wide range of pedagogical strategies to use when their students do not learn as they are expected.

In many ways, debating the comparative effectiveness of teachers prepared through traditional teacher education, Teach for America, or other “short-route” preparation programs distracts us from our central challenge in creating effective 21st century public schools. There is more variation within traditional teacher education and alternative routes like TFA than between them.(1) And indeed, a close examination of research on TFA cohorts suggests that their teaching effectiveness gains are likely due not to their individual dispositions or test scores, but to the additional training and support they receive over their two years in the classroom.(2)

In her Atlantic article, Ripley cites a study that found no correlation between prior experience teaching in disadvantaged neighborhoods and teaching effectiveness. But this study misses a key variable: context-specific preparation for high-needs classrooms, which is rare in many university-based programs and far too brief an experience in TFA and other alternative routes.(3) This problem is compounded when the school and district offer few if any systemic supports such as professional development, collaboration, and assistance navigating school communities. These systemic supports are what are needed for talented teachers to teach effectively. And many effective teachers, over the long haul, are exactly what students in high-needs schools most need and deserve.

Yes, there are a few superstar teachers who can do it alone—but only for a short period of time, as they usually burn out and give up teaching. Our public schools, which hire over 250,000 new teachers a year, cannot improve over time if they are staffed with a revolving door of underprepared teachers.

(1) Boyd, D., Grossman, P., Lankford H., Loeb, S. and Wyckoff, J. (2006.) How changes in entry requirements alter the teacher Workforce and affect student achievement. Education Finance and Policy 1,no.2 (Spring):176-216.

(2) Berry, B. (2005, October 19). Teacher quality and the question of preparation. Education Week. Retrieved April 1, 2009 from http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2005/10/19/08berry.h25.html.

(3) Rice, J. K. (2008, Spring). From highly qualified to high quality: An imperative for policy and research to recast the teacher mold. Education Finance and Policy, (3)2, 151-164.  Retrieved January 19, 2010 at http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/edfp.2008.3.2.151.

Alesha Daughtrey holds a Master’s in Public Policy from Duke University and brings extensive policy analysis and advocacy experience to her work managing CTQ’s research initiatives.

Ali Kliegman taught seventh grade Humanities in the Bronx for two years as a Teach for America corps member. She holds an M.S. in Teaching from Pace University and worked previously in education policy for the legal reform coalition Common Good.

 

We Need to Dispel the Myths about Effective Teachers

If you want to reflect for a moment on education half-truths and the imprecise diagnosis of teaching quality problems, take a look at two articles published in the October 18th edition of the Los Angeles Times — one on value-added teacher evaluations and the other on challenging education myths.

Both pieces raise important issues related to the role of teacher education as well as student test scores in developing and identifying effective teachers. But in addressing those issues, the journalist-authors actually embellish current myths rather than dispel them — and may send us down the wrong policy road.

Myth: Teacher tenure rules make it impossible to get rid of poor teachers.

Fact: A recent study by the New Teacher Project clearly shows that the difficulty in removing ineffective teachers has much more to do with poorly trained administrators who have few skills and inadequate tools to distinguish between excellent, average, and poor teaching. Another report, from the Center for American Progress also concluded that poor evaluation procedures, not tenure, are most likely to account for a school district’s inability to fire poor performers.

Myth: Teach for America, a rapid-entry alternative certification program designed to recruit bright young people into teaching, produces more effective teachers than traditional university-based programs.

Fact: Nationally, the Teach for America program produced about 4000 new teachers this school year, a very small contribution given that U.S. public schools need to hire about 250,000 new teachers annually. Studies show that TFA recruits tend to produce student achievement gains only slightly better than comparison teachers — and only in math, not in reading. Most importantly, the comparison groups in these studies tend to be teachers in the same or similar schools who have even less formal pedagogical preparation than TFA recruits. Why? Because the high needs schools in which TFA’ers teach often have to rely on substitutes and other poorly qualified individuals. Studies also show that more than 80 percent of Teach for America recruits, much like other recruits who enter with little formal training, leave the classroom by their third year of teaching, becoming part of the revolving door of novices who pass quickly through high-needs classrooms. This does not mean that tradtional teacher education has it right. It doesn’t. But less is not more in preparing teachers for high needs schools.

Myth: Standardized tests now in place are always the most accurate means of assessing student progress and teacher effectiveness. Scores from these tests should be the primary metric for evaluating teachers and increasing accountability.

Fact: Today’s “value-added” systems for measuring teacher effects can provide useful information, but the data are not always reliable for making high-stakes decisions. Assessments based solely on scores from tests currently in use are not designed to help teachers become more effective. Also, recent studies show that most value-added student academic gains are attributed to teacher teams, not individuals. Drawing on very sophisticated analyses, these studies reveal that the most powerful predictor of student achievement over time seems to be whether small groups of teachers are learning from each other as they teach. This suggests that policymakers should not just focus on replacing the “bottom 6-10%” of ineffective teachers, but devise strategies so that “teachers raise their games when the quality of their colleagues improves.”

Policymakers and practitioners do need to think much differently about assessing teachers and transforming teacher education. But that new thinking will not be productive if we cling to the educational equivalent of urban legends about what makes for effective teachers and successful students.

Reaping the Whirlwind

John Merrow’s recent PBS NewsHour broadcast on staffing our nation’s most challenging schools with Teach for America (TFA) recruits is a must see. Listening to Mr. Merrow’s interview with Paul Vallas, you would think the superintendent of the New Orleans Recovery School District has only one of two choices: fill classrooms with young, energetic, “top talent” from competitive colleges — or with old, tired, academically and pedagogically inept teachers from wherever.

The facts revealed in Merrow’s report show how important it is for teachers to get the “right” training and support in order to teach effectively in high needs schools -- much less in an urban community like New Orleans, with a long history of school problems capped by the most devastating natural disaster in modern American history.

The issue is not the intense, five-week lockstep pedagogical training regime of TFA. Nor is it the typical, disconnected university-based teacher education program, where teaching-methods courses have little to do with preparation for high needs schools. The answer is something else, and a big piece of it can be seen in emerging urban teacher residency initiatives in Chicago and elsewhere — and the cutting-edge preparation programs at top-flight education schools like those at Stanford and UCLA.

In these pacesetter programs, education researchers work with expert K-12 teachers who develop and support new recruits over time. With high-quality residency and internship programs, we can help new teachers build the resiliency they must have to survive and prosper in schools that need them most. The smart, idealistic people who enter these programs are able to work side by side — for many weeks and months — with seasoned veterans who are able to share their successful strategies and their deep knowledge of high-needs school culture.

Pop sociologist Malcolm Gladwell, in his best-selling book, Outliers, has made a compelling case that training and effort are more important than talent. Gladwell points out that the most effective individuals (including teachers, we can assume) put in at least 10,000 hours of practice on the road to proficiency and success. Compare that to the average amount of practice we give to new teachers — traditional or alternative — before we hurl them into one of the most challenging jobs in our society.

During her interview with Merrow, TFA recruit Jeylan Erman lamented that “I thought I'd come into teaching being naturally good at it, because I care so much about students. I automatically thought that, because I care so much, I [would necessarily] be really great. It's not like that.”

The New Orleans recruits needed more pedagogical tools and more seasoned veterans to help them teach effectively. They also needed to work in a redefined teaching profession, where youth is not pitted against experience, and teachers and administrators work closely with health and social service agencies (like the Harlem’s Children Zone) to connect schools and communities in serving students and their families.

Although many teachers who viewed the NewsHour report were understandably upset by any suggestion that multiple years of professional service is somehow a negative, the Merrow piece actually makes a compelling case that all new teachers, no matter their academic pedigree, need serious training and support in order to teach in high needs schools.

Watch it carefully and probe beyond the surface debate about 5-week TFA training versus the 12-week student teaching experience offered  by most education schools. Let’s quit wasting all this youthful talent, energy and idealism and get serious about what it truly takes to recruit, prepare and retain teachers for the kids we all say we care about. Until we do, we’ll continue to reap the whirlwind.

Growing NBCTs in High Needs Schools

While shortages of qualified and effective teachers persist in high-needs schools, there is no shortage of rhetoric about the proper remedy.

It’s a rare week when a think tank or research center does not produce a report on what ails the teaching profession. For example just recently, the Center for American Progress released two reports — one on attracting and retaining effective teachers for high needs schools and the other on pay for performance programs as a primary tool to do so. Both reports from the influential think tank are informative, but like many others before them, they do not address a number of critical issues. One very important missing piece: quality teacher preparation and good working conditions are critical in supplying effective, stick-with-it teachers to high needs schools. Another missing element in the discussion: The important role of growing expertise from within.

Our own research at the Center for Teaching Quality has taught us how powerful the certification process can be as a strategy in developing successful teachers in high-needs schools. We have also learned from National Board Certified Teachers, who describe the huge payoffs that come when teams of teachers sitting for the National Boards use their intensified focus on high standards to consider many teacher effectiveness issues that policy pundits overlook or do not fully understand.

One of the best examples can be found in a crime-riddled, impoverished neighborhood in Phoenix, Arizona, where 20 of Mitchell Elementary School’s 34 teachers are either National Board Certified or in the process of earning the performance-based credential. Mitchell serves a community where less than 25 percent of the adults have a high school education. Over 50 percent of the students are second language learners; 96 percent are on free/reduced lunch, and 96 percent are Latino. The school was once in NCLB corrective action. Now Mitchell meets all its AYP goals each year.

The district did not recruit expert teachers to high needs school; they grew them from within. In addition, most of their home-grown NBCTs have roots in the community. Most are minorities, like the students they teach.

Most importantly, Mitchell teachers claim the process has transformed their teaching and given them newfound opportunities to take more control over their professional development. With support from the Arizona K-12 Center and its director, Kathy Wiebke, teachers are using the National Board process to better understand their teaching and how it directly impacts student achievement — as a collective. In particular, together these teachers are learning more about how to teach students with special needs and work more closely with parents.

As the district’s associate superintendent, Suzanne Zentner, noted, “We believe in the NBC process" as an “alternative approach to improving student performance” and closing the achievement gaps.  Teacher turnover is no problem at Mitchell Elementary School in inner-city Phoenix.

We all agree that we must pursue fresh approaches to recruiting and retaining effective teachers for high needs schools. The strategy of growing NBCTs from within is showing promising results where it has been tried. It's the best of all worlds -- combining rigorous professional standards, teacher collaboration, and bottom-up leadership. We need to give this promising strategy every chance to succeed.

How Teacher Education (and Master’s Degrees) Make a Difference for Student Achievement

 I must say I am little weary of policy pundits who say that schools of education and master’s degree programs make no difference in the lives of teachers and the students they serve. Certainly there are some that do not. As Linda Darling-Hammond said in a recent interview, “probably a quarter of the teacher-education enterprise” is of very high quality. Other programs are “pretty good,” she said, “but they could be a lot better if there were incentives and supports to get them there. And there are some that need to be put out of business.”

One of the high quality programs is at the University of Florida — where a group of teacher educators, non-profit leaders, and children’s advocates have created a Ready Schools Strategy that connects teacher preparation and professional development with health and social services in Florida’s high-needs school communities.

Last week I was fortunate to work with Don Pemberton of the UF Lastinger Center for Learning, Dave Lawrence and Ana Sejeck of the Early Childhood Initiative Foundation, and Dorene Ross of the College of Education as well as several terrific teachers. During my visit I learned a great deal about their Teacher Leadership and School Improvement Initiative in Miami-Dade and its powerful impact on Redondo Elementary, located in Homestead, Florida. Redondo serves a beautiful multi-ethnic group of Pre-K through third grade students (of which almost 50 percent are English Language Learners and over 90 percent receive free or reduced price meals).

Let’s start with what matters for the kids: In 2005 less than 50% of the Redondo’s students were proficient in reading or math. Since the launch of the Ready Schools Strategy, including a specialized master’s program for a core group of teachers, the student achievement has escalated. In 2008, over 67% of the school’s third graders were proficient in reading; over 92% in math. Rene Baly, the school’s principal, credits hard-working teachers who have learned to teach differently. He also credits working conditions, which give teachers more time to learn from each other and to work closely with health care, social work, and community outreach professionals who help connect the work of teaching to the lives of students and their families.

The school’s health practitioners see 60 students a week – treating a variety of illnesses and eye and ear problems – to ensure students are ready to learn as well as feel safe and loved. Family engagement efforts bring the school to the neighborhood, but also offer tailored training in English and parenting skills to the mothers and fathers, aunts and uncles of Redondo’s children. On a weekly basis at least 25 of the school’s parents attend sessions.

Teacher preparation and support are critical components as well. Don Pemberton’s vision and entrepreneurial skills have brought a fully-paid, job-embedded advanced degree program to the school’s teachers. The UF education school has orchestrated a set of research-focused learning experiences that cultivate new teacher skills related to differentiated instruction, data driven decision-making, culturally responsive teaching, classroom management, and leadership — while giving individual teachers opportunities to specialize in literacy or second language learners. What's most striking is that the education school program is highly adaptive. It's equally helpful to a recently minted novice who had little training in how to teach in a high needs school; an alternative certification recruit who knows her content but has few pedagogical skills that enable her to teach it to diverse learners; or a veteran teacher who needs to develop new research-based skills in literacy and assessment.

During my visit I met several outstanding teachers. They were not graduates of elite colleges or individuals enticed with bonuses and performance pay to teach in high needs schools. Instead, most were from the community and represent a new vision for “growing your own” effective teachers for challenging schools. In return for being able to earn a “no-cost” master’s degree, the teachers agree to teach at Redondo for at least 5 years.

Zolia Esteve, an 11-year veteran, says that as a result of the program she is now much more effective at teaching reading. She described a second grader “Julia” who was reading less than 20 words a minute now being able to not just read but comprehend 120 words a minute. She also has the “confidence to challenge” the administration on how to better deliver services to students. Principal Rene Baly is grateful for Esteve's newly developed leadership skills and the new ideas she brings to table.

I also met Melissa LaRosa, a finalist for Reading Coach of the Year in Florida, who spends countless hours team teaching and providing support and advice to her colleagues, who view her as a “teacher’s teacher.” For Melissa, who proudly wore her Edugator t-shirt during our visit, the University of Florida master’s degree program and its focused inquiry approach made her a better coach, providing her much needed skills in using data and understanding why students were learning or not.

Finally, I was proud to meet Cathleen Caves, another teacher in the program, who actually went to Redondo when she was in elementary school. She began her career as a teaching assistant and is now one of the school’s experts in the use of a variety of formative assessments to drive instruction. Cathleen told me that the UF graduate program "is fantastic.” Pointing to Zolia and Melissa, who were in room with us, she added: “We are more like a family than ever before.” Perhaps most importantly, she asserted, “With my salary I sure could not pay for this degree myself — and now I want to teach here for my whole career.”

The Teacher Leadership and School Improvement Initiative has just graduated its first class. Next year the University of Florida expects to serve 400 graduate students (pending funding). Don Pemberton, at the helm of Lastinger Center's Ready Schools master teacher strategy, envisions preparing and supporting – and networking – 10,000 Florida educators who are all dedicated to teaching effectively in high needs schools.

Smart teacher preparation and support may just be the solution we've been searching for to end the current maldistribution of effective teachers. If so, the University of Florida is blazing a trail that other education schools and master’s degree programs can follow if they really want to make a difference.

Debating the Certification Debate

In a Nov. 14th post, the luminous Eduwonkette raises the issue of why there is so much attention paid to teacher certification in the United States.  Drawing on the teacher quality research of Richard Ingersoll – who calls for “upgrading training and certification standards” — the erudite Ms. 'Kette raises questions about the often intense (dare I say vitriolic) calls by Washington DC pundits and media-types to do away with teacher certification standards.

The certification critics often cite Tom Kane’s research that shows little difference in the student achievement scores of the new teachers who enter through traditional (more extended, university-based) and alternative (short-cut training) certification regimes. There are methodological holes in the Kane study – but that is not the point to be taken here. The issue  is not “certification or not” – or “teacher education or Teach for America.”  The issue is what teachers need to know before they begin to teach and how our education system ensures they do know – so kids do not get harmed.

So here is my initial short list for a new kind of teacher certification system. It must be one that ensures  novices know how to: (1) find the right kind of standards-based teaching resources for the diverse students they teach; (2) work well with second language and special needs learners; (3) use and analyze student achievement data for improving teaching, (4) create effective classroom management systems for 21st century learning, and (5) work well with parents and families and draw on community resources to serve their students. 

Our solicitous Eduwonkette makes the point that other professions do not have their certification systems so scrutinized — and in some cases even vilified. What if we halted the vitriolic debate and considered what we want our teachers to know and do– and then supported them in their efforts to serve our nation’s students and their families?

And why don’t we transcend the debate over who should be recruited to teaching and how much preparation they should have--by discarding the idea that one teacher is solely responsible for 25 students? Instead, we can create policies that promote our best teachers to serve as supervisors and coaches of a wide range of novices, adjuncts, and teaching assistants who collectively work with large groups of students. What could dynamic support do for the retention and quality of all new teachers?

NCATE or TEAC

Controversy continues to brew on how to best judge universities who prepare teachers. The latest example comes from Maryland where “teacher colleges may get an option on accreditation.” Until a few years ago, the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) was the only agency sanctioned to accredit universities that prepare teachers. In 2003, the U.S. Department of Education recognized the Teacher Education Accreditation Council (TEAC) established as a competitor. To be sure, both share the goal of improving teacher preparation – but there is a major difference.

Universities must meet NCATE standards – which are externally developed by consumers (administrators, teachers) and regulators (policymakers). However, under the auspices of TEAC universities can make up their own standards. This cannot be a good thing – especially given the demand from the federal government that every teacher be ‘"highly qualified. " Why should a university have a choice when it comes to meeting standards? Can you imagine hospitals getting to choose whether or not they have to meet standards? Or getting to choose the standards they are expected to meet?

As noted in the recent new article (cited above), Edward Root, Maryland state board of education president, complained about NCATE's "burdensome" overemphasis on content: "It requires too many courses in math, physics or chemistry that the teachers do not teach in high schools." Is that not what the USDOE has pushed with its "highly qualified" teacher provisions?

This issue is worth exploring. Hmmm.

Teacher Education & Certification Effects Redux

Once again a group of researchers have laid claim that teacher education and certification have little positive effect on student achievement. In a study published by the Hoover Institute, Tom Kane, Doug Staiger, and Jonah Rockoff found that while traditionally prepared and certified teachers produce higher student achievement scores at first, alternatively certified and uncertified teachers catch up by end of year three. In a slanted news story, published yesterday by the New York Sun (November 21, 2006), researchers claimed that policymakers should worry less about teacher education and certification and more about firing ineffective teachers in their first few years of teaching. However, what was not noted was the following:

1. By the end of Year 3 alternative certification teachers, if they remain in teaching, actually have been trained in “how to teach” and have earned a master’s degree from schools of education;

2. Most of the alternatively certified teachers had left by Year 3, after proving less effective with their students for the two years they taught; and

3. The much higher attrition of alternative certification teachers leaves most students with a revolving door of new and untrained novices, and in doing so, reifies gross inequities in the our public school system.

In a previous study, drawing on the same database, researchers concluded that there was more variation within the traditional and alternative pathways into teaching than between them. This means there are effective multiple ways to prepare teachers. However, these studies do not at all suggest that teachers do not need extensive preparation before they begin teaching. And these studies do not reveal the horrific working conditions teachers often face — especially in New York City — rendering fruitless whatever preparation they received. The Hoover-funded researchers called for “getting rid of teachers who perform badly during probationary periods.” Yet, their data actually suggest that policymakers should find out what kinds of teacher preparation and induction supports novices need and make deeper investments in them.

TMAO and Teacher Education

Once again, TMAO (Teaching My Ass Off), 27-year old accomplished teacher from California has done it again. Another one of his must read blogs on teacher education was posted a few weeks (and unfortunately I just got around to reading it). In response to Arthur Levine’s knuckle-cracking report, TMAO, while recognizing the need for teachers to be prepared, points out for the most part, “teacher training sucks.”

I love his spirit and his mind when he writes: “Th(ere) is a difference between being able to recite Maslov's hierarchy of needs, and knowing what to do with 33 kids who aren't filling up level one of their need-pyramids. The difference between being well-versed in the value of a progressive classroom management system, and understanding the importance of being the show in the classroom, bringing out your inner silverback guerilla, the necessity of owning student behavior as a fundamental professional obligation.”

TMAO has some good ideas about a new kind of preparation program – a multi-year version that co-mingles the development of content, pedagogical, and clinical training. His ideas, in some ways, flesh out additional detail regarding the kind of preparation John Norton and I posited in our recent Edutopia article, “Learn from the Masters.” Go read his blog entry and consider the BIG question: “Who will pay for such an teacher training enterprise?” There are those who do not demand this kind of TMAO-type teacher education because of the cost. If you expect teachers to know more and be trained more before they take over a classroom of their own, then they must be paid more.....hmmmm.

Educating School Teachers: A Critique

Just recently (September 18, 2006) the former President of Teacher’s College, Arthur Levine, released a report, Educating School Teachers. As Education Week noted in a September 20th article, Levine’s findings paint teacher education “as a troubled (field) in which a majority of aspiring teachers are educated in low-quality programs that do not sufficiently prepare them for the classroom.”

Levine’s well-written, hard-hitting thesis is timely given that “the nation is deeply divided about how to prepare large numbers of high-quality teachers.” Drawing on a range of data I have suggested previously that “this rancorous debate (often) becomes a contest between those who want to protect the current teacher education monopoly owned by university faculties, and those who want to jettison the traditional teacher preparation provided by slow-moving colleges of education and out-of-touch professors.” Levine agrees, noting that “there is a schism over the how’s and when’s of teacher education between those who believe teaching is a profession like law or medicine, requiring a substantial amount of education before an individual can become a practitioner, and those who think teaching is a craft like journalism, which is learned principally on the job.”

For the most part, Levine’s findings are on point. Built on four years of case studies, surveys, and the extant research literature, he claims that teacher educators “lack agreement” about what they should produce, and programs at the 1200 colleges and universities often consisting of a “confusing patchwork.”

He briefly offers equally harsh words for the proliferating alternative certification programs that place new recruits into high need schools and classrooms without the necessary preparation. The federal government’s push for Teach for America-like on-the-job training ignores both “quality ceilings and floors.”

Granted, Levine’s recommendations — like measuring teacher education by focusing on student achievement, turning teacher preparation into a clinically based, rigorous 5-year enterprise, and closing failing programs — are noteworthy. But they are nothing new. All one has to do is read the 20-year old reports of the Holmes Group or even James Conant’s 40-year old book, The Education of American Teachers.

However, the report’s controversy rests on two conclusions — education schools must recruit more academically-abled students and the current system of professional accreditation is so flawed that it needs to be discarded. Both conclusions warrant some discussion.

First, education schools have grave difficulties, at no fault of their own, in attracting the highest-scoring students. They instead often attend competitive universities that can cost as much as $180,000 and open doors into any number of high paying professions and fields. As any economist would claim, with a starting salary of less than $30,000, teachers cannot afford the high price of an elite education. Levine, in an earlier essay published in the Chronicle of Higher Education, poignantly paints the real picture on what keeps academically-abled students from becoming teachers: “Education schools do not determine the salaries, the status, or the working conditions of teachers. Only states, localities, and school systems can change the pool of people entering the education profession.”

Second, Levine’s report claims that elite universities do not seek professional accreditation from the National Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education, and as such, the field should not require it. However, unlike in other professions, teachers do not have to graduate from a professionally accredited school in order to practice their trade. Levine’s report ignores the stark fact that education schools volunteer to have their programs examined externally, and now can choose among two different varieties (adding more confusion to the field). Also, Levine sidesteps the fact that of top five education schools he cited as exemplary, three are NCATE accredited. Professional accreditation in teacher education is clearly not a perfect quality control mechanism, but the process has enforced standards. Last Spring 23 percent of the colleges who tried to meet NCATE standards failed to do so. Research cited by Levine shows that graduates of NCATE institutions are more likely to stay in teaching longer, and thus generate higher student achievement gains over time.

Like Levine I am smitten with Deborah Ball’s (education school dean at the University of Michigan) “lucid and compelling explanation of (the) teacher education curriculum” — one that includes an “enriched” major with a specialty in teaching content to diverse learners. I would add a complementary residency designed and adapted to the diverse recruits (traditional and alternative) needed to effectively staff our nation’s schools. NCATE, if made mandatory, could play a major role in the quality control. The federal government and states could play an even more important role by ensuring that those teacher education recruits who pass muster are paid substantially more. Then we might find our way to guarantee a caring, qualified, well-supported, and effective teacher for every student.

Getting the Story Right on Teacher Education

Jay Mathews, usually a sharp education reporter, missed a beat or two in his August 6th Washington Post article, Learning from the Masters. He tries to make the point that “some of the best” teachers do not learn their lessons in education schools and university professors ignore what award winning-teachers, like Jason Kamras, have to offer. Mr. Kamras, the 2005 National Teacher of the Year with a masters degree in education from Harvard University, uses a number of successful “tricks of the trade” – seemingly not taught in education school courses. After only a few telephone calls to unnamed professors, Mr. Mathews leaps to the spurious conclusion that education schools do not help future teachers learn from experts (like using Mr. Kamras’ strategy of “marking of just a few homework questions helped raise test scores by enabling him to cover more lessons without getting bogged down in grading papers.”). Mr. Mathews complains that education schools teach research-proven methods at the expense of teaching the “practical” but “unorthodox” teaching methods of award-winning teachers.

Mr. Mathews should have also featured in his article Betsy Rogers — 2003 National Teacher of the Year. Betsy, a National Board Certified Teacher from Alabama, returned to teach in 2004 to one of her state’s lowest performing schools, Brighton Elementary. Betsy is an extraordinary teacher (and now curriculum coach) whose teaching experiences and methods have been chronicled in Education Week and in her blog on the Teacher Leaders Network.

Betsy is also a clinical professor at Samford University where she helps prepare new teachers – who have been recruited to work with her at Brighton. A few weeks ago Betsy told me how she and her Samford professorial colleagues are using scientifically-based approaches to reading with their teacher education students — and this has been the key to soaring student test scores of the Samford graduates who are now teaching with her at Brighton. And now last eve,
Betsy informed me that Brighton, just two years after her arrival, made Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) as prescribed by No Child Left Behind.

Samford University, like all high-quality education schools, draw on K-12 teaching experts to prepare the next generation of future teachers. Education schools are needed more than ever to help future and practicing teachers learn how to teach in increasingly challenging schools. The best ones draw on proven theories of how to teach literacy and math as well as how to design lessons for second language learners and to reach out to parents and family members. The best education schools also draw on lessons from the masters like Mr. Kamras and Ms. Rogers. Mr. Mathews should be a bit more diligent and precise in gathering data for his stories.

More on the NCTQ Reading Study Debacle

Over the last week or so I have written several times on the “research” report, What Education Schools Aren't Teaching About Reading--and What Elementary Teachers Aren't Learning, released by the National Council on Teacher Quality. While I believe that education schools have much to do to improve the preparation of teachers who can teach reading and literacy effectively, the NCTQ. Report, with its biased methods, was not much more than a typical tirade against teacher education.

Recently I heard from Dean Jean Box of Samford University, an education school which received an “F” from the NCTQ reviewers. Jean sent me a formal response that her colleagues developed in response to NCTQ’s sloppy study. As you may remember the NCTQ study methods relied almost solely on what could be found by downloading a professor’s course syllabus from the web and quickly noting if the right words and texts were used to describe the “science” of teaching reading. In critiquing the study generally Dr. Box noted that:

• Course syllabi outline the main points of a course of study, but do not provide certainty as to whether or not the components outlined are taught properly or satisfactorily.

• Some lectures and lecture details are presented in handouts separate from the syllabus, which may not be found online….and consequently, an online course syllabus is not an adequate source for comparison among universities and cannot be used to measure student learning or instructional behavior.

• Failure to alert schools that they were to be named in the study was a breach of research ethics.

In responding to NCTQ’s rating Samford University as a failure, Dr. Box and colleagues noted that:

• Researchers looking for syllabi with reading in the title would not find any on Samford’s website (since our) program is designed around comprehensive interdisciplinary courses with unfamiliar titles.

• Because of the interdisciplinary nature of the courses, no lectures at all and only a very few of the course activities are listed on the syllabi.

• Samford’s program places students in classrooms to work with master teachers 60-180 hours every semester (not including student teaching). This strong clinical emphasis was not taken into consideration by the study.

Dr. Box continues:

“The authors of the study criticized the National Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) for accrediting programs “that do not teach reading.” We suggest that through NCATE’s in depth approach to program assessment they were better able to determine what each program was actually teaching and how graduates were performing in the profession. This cannot be determined by a cursory look at syllabi pulled from the web.”

It is about time that our nation’s effective teacher education programs, and there are many of them, stand up and respond when policy pundits make unwarranted claims in order to advance their ideological agenda. I am certain this story is not over.

Flawed NCTQ Research and the Flaying of Teacher Education

Recently the National Center on Teacher Quality, in its typical flaying of teacher education, released a report claiming that 85 percent of our nation’s colleges and universities are failing by “not educating prospective teachers in the basic knowledge and skills necessary to teach reading effectively” In my June 7, 2006 posting I revealed how NCTQ clearly was seeking to lambaste teacher educators for not teaching future teachers how to incorporate phonics, phonemic awareness, and fluency in their reading programs. The NCTQ research methods, relying solely on a crude assessment of a selective sampling of reading course syllabi and textbooks, were more flawed than the teacher education programs reviewed.

In my commentary I specifically mentioned NCTQ for giving Samford University a “F” in preparing teachers to teach reading, and offered compelling testimony from Betsy Rogers, 2003 National Teacher of the Year, who works closely with the university and its teacher education graduates at Brighton Elementary School (where Betsy and these young Samford teacher education graduates) are no doubt helping many students learn to both decode words and comprehend them. Now I have heard from both administrators and faculty from Samford — with more evidence of the biases of NCTQ research methods.

Jeanie A. Box, dean of OBB School of Education and Professional Studies, and Carol Dean, chair of Teacher Education wrote in an email to me:

“Samford education graduates are well-trained in Alabama Reading Initiative modules and receive extensive training in the five components specifically mentioned in the research study - phonemic awareness, phonics, guided oral fluency, vocabulary, and reading comprehension. The authors of the study did not understand how to read our teacher education syllabi. Course titles specifically targeted by the researchers such as Early Reading, Reading Across the Content Area, etc., do not appear in our program. Rather, the curriculum for teacher preparation is integrated and reading is embedded in several comprehensive syllabi."

They continue:

"In addition, all syllabi refer to the Alabama Reading Initiative, which is a research-based balanced approach to reading well known throughout the country. Because those who work with the ARI understand its philosophy, the (right) words do not appear in our syllabi but (a balanced approach to teaching reading) is clearly communicated to our students. Individual course lectures (one of the criteria used by researchers to rate syllabi) are not listed in our course syllabi but are given to students as a separate document at the beginning of each semester. A critical part of Samford’s teacher preparation program is the extensive clinical experiences afforded our students. Each student spends 60 – 120 hours every semester in the classroom working with master teachers. These kind of experiences were not included as part of the study.”

A faculty member later wrote to NCTQ president Ms. Kate Walsh explaining in considerable detail how her “data collection methods (were) abhorrent at best” and in no way were able to capture how Samford teacher education students indeed were learning how to teach reading, using all five major components of effective instructi0n identified by the National Reading Panel. My June 7th commentary surfaced the compelling hard evidence, using test score data, of how Samford teacher education graduates are helping young Brighton elementary school students learn to read. NCTQ did not seek the hard evidence in their study only the kind that could easily tell the story they wanted told.

As I have written before there are education schools that need to be doing a much better job in teaching reading. However, I wonder how many other education schools NCTQ has unfairly flayed. I wonder how NCTQ can explain away its biases and repair the real damage its almost witch-hunt like research methods have inflicted on universities, faculty, and teacher education graduates. And again I wonder why NCTQ chose not to review short-cut alternative route programs into teaching in their prejudiced approach to “What Teacher Preparation Programs Aren't Teaching About Reading--and What Elementary Teachers Aren't Learning.”

Teaching Teachers to Teach Reading: A Critical Review

Recently the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) released a self-proclaimed “groundbreaking” study, What Teacher Preparation Programs Aren't Teaching About Reading--and What Elementary Teachers Aren't Learning. The report claimed that “85 percent of colleges and universities are not educating prospective teachers in the basic knowledge and skills necessary to teach reading effectively.” In its scathing critique of teacher education, NCTQ sought to assess the degree to which teacher education students had courses that exposed them to the individual components of the “good reading instruction.” The NCTQ cites the National Reading Panel liberally, with its call for teachers to focus on five literacy components, phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension, in a balanced way. But the NCTQ report is all about whether or not education schools hone in on phonemic awareness and phonics. Those programs whose syllabi emphasize the right components get the good grades. Others fail.

Don’t get me wrong: I am certain many education schools are not doing what is necessary to ensure that future teachers know how to effectively teach reading. Of the nation’s 1200 education schools some still offer only one 3-hour semester course in general reading methods, while others require as many as 18 semester hours in reading coursework that covers topics ranging from the structure of
English to working with second language learners to teaching reading comprehension. Some require no clinical training in schools, under the supervision of expert reading teachers, while others offer as many as 50 to 60 hours every semester. I do not question one iota that education schools can and must do better.

However, while the NCTQ report does raise good questions, its anti-teacher education bent and sloppy methods get in the way of being very helpful to policy makers, practitioners, and the public. The NCTQ study, sans any peer review required of a scientific investigation, has laid claim to their findings solely by analyzing a sample of textbooks and available syllabi (found on college websites) from 72 of the nation’s 1200 schools of education. Their sample selection of 5 percent may very well be reasonable and valid. However, some of their methods bordered on bizarre, and seemingly are designed to find the evidence NCTQ sought. For example, NCTQ reviewed course syllabi and textbooks – a reasonable indicator of what is taught in a college class. However, the research team refused to conduct surveys because, as they claimed, “these would only reflect a teacher education students’ perceptions of a (reading) course not what was in it in actuality.” This is indeed bizarre. To me teacher education student responses to what they were taught and what they learned in their reading courses would seem to be a better measure of reality than what was listed in a syllabi found on a website.

However, the inclusion of Samford University on the NCTQ failing education school list caused some pause. Samford, an award-winning private university in Birmingham, Alabama, has not only a terrific reputation among administrators and school board members in the state but has won numerous national awards for excellence in teacher education. More importantly, Samford University graduates are indeed trained and trained well to teach reading. And who better to make the claim than Betsy Rogers, 2003 National Teacher of the Year, a National Board Certified Teacher, and now a School Improvement Specialist at what was once one of Alabama’s lowest performing elementary schools. Betsy writes in an email to me:

"Samford’s graduates, who are working with me at Brighton are excellent. First of all they are extremely professional and have high expectations for themselves and the students. They are well versed in the (nationally acclaimed) Alabama Reading Initiative and they know how to use the Alabama Reading Assessment, DIBELS. Plus they have also been taught to work well with high need students and as a result even as first year teachers our students did not overwhelm them. They have an excellent understanding of the foundation of teaching reading. They have adapted easily to our programs and know how to use them to help students with individual learning differences, to read. In addition, these new teachers taught in our summer reading program last year and received six weeks of extra training and coaching. They have been great. With their help over the last several years our test scores in reading have risen dramatically."

Later Betsy sent me in another email the soaring student test scores of these Samford graduates. For example, in 2005-06 kindergarten phoneme segmentation fluency reached 100% percent while first grade oral reading fluency reached 79 percent and phoneme segmentation fluency reached 100% percent. Samford graduates did learn how to teach scientifically-based approaches to reading, even though the syllabi and available texts did not convince the NCTQ.

Several years ago the National Commission on Excellence in Elementary Teacher Preparation for Reading Instruction released a real study that actually looked at meaningful data — and documenting the specific qualities of effective teacher preparation programs that produce gains in reading achievement. (BTW, the NCTQ report totally ignored this major reading study.), Using a quasi-experimental research design, the Commission surveyed 950 teacher education programs, selected 28 for in-depth study, and then followed 101 recent program graduates into their first three years of teaching, tracking both their attitudes and effectiveness.

Effective teachers of reading, that those they increase student achievement on standardized reading tests, “draw from a repertoire of strategies to help struggling readers,” not just the phonics only approach emphasized by the NCTQ. The Commission found that effective reading programs focused specifically on early literacy, including oral language, phonemic awareness, phonics, and word identification and fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension as well as assessing all aspects of literacy learning, and organizing and managing literacy instruction across grade levels. Perhaps, most importantly, the effective programs “engage their pre-service teachers in a variety of course-related field experiences where they have opportunities to interact with excellent models and mentors.”

The well-written NCTQ report raises some important issues (especially around assignments undergraduates are expected to complete). But without a more credible approach to assembling evidence I am concerned that their study will end up only as yet one more of their customary diatribes about teacher education and the teaching profession.

A final question: How NCTQ would have rated Teach for America and other alternative certification programs, offering only 5 weeks of training for all of teacher education, on reading preparation? Searching the TFA website there is no course syllabi available, much less one that could be evaluated to determine if this short-cut, alternative route into teaching — much favored by NCTQ — prepared its “graduates” to be effective teachers of reading. Hmm. Someone explain that one to me.

Kids Drop-out Because Teachers Don’t Know How to Teach and Reach Them

Here is yet another study strongly suggesting that teachers need to know more that their content – they also need to understand how to teach.

Civic Enterprises (an inside the beltway research firm led by two former Bush administration officials) and commissioned by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, found that more than 60% of high school drop-outs reported earning C’s or above.  Approximately 66% of survey respondents also claimed that if teachers and administrators pushed them harder they would have worked harder. Almost half of them reported their classes were not interesting – i.e., their teachers just did not know to teach and reach them.

The study, The Silent Epidemic offers a haunting tale of high school where students are disengaged by the curriculum schools offer and how teachers teach. High school reformers would do well to listen to students – the ultimate beneficiaries of the reform policies they create. Granted, much of the Gates Foundation’s $1 billion effort to redesign high schools focuses on rigor and relevance as well as relationships. But not enough is being done to prepare teachers in how to teach and provide them with more training and time to understand and know their students well.

Unfortunately, the Bush Administration, while recanting the Gates mantra in calling for more rigor, relevance, and relationships in today’s high schools, continues to promote alternative certification and other short-cut recruitment strategies that can almost guarantee that teachers do not know how to teach and reach their students.  A recent evaluation of the Gates’ high school grantees revealed that teachers needed a great deal more support in finding and using curriculum materials that could engage their students as well as the “implementation of innovative (teaching) practices within the context of current standards and accountability requirements.”

Most any college graduate can speak of the horrors of sitting through obtuse, disconnected, uninspiring lectures from a Ph.D. who knew their subject matter “cold.” Good high school teachers must know how to make content accessible to all students. So what is it going to take for policymakers to get it when it comes to teaching quality?  Maybe we need to turn up the volume on what kids are saying about their high schools and how they are taught.

Teacher Education Making a Difference? (or did I read the same report as those at NCTQ?)

The anti-teacher education crowd must be rubbing its proverbial head.

A recent study by researchers Donald Boyd, Pamela Grossman, Hamilton Lankford, Susanna Loeb, and James Wyckoff have surfaced some intriguing and thought-provoking conclusions, drawn from their major study of the effects of different pathways into teaching in New York City on the teacher workforce and on student achievement.  Using a large, sophisticated database and employing thoughtful and fair-minded analyses, these researchers offer up important findings regarding the importance of teacher education in improving teaching quality. The bottom line, much to the chagrin of the teacher education misanthropists, is that there is nothing from the Boyd study that suggests university-based teacher preparation needs to disappear from the face of the earth.

Indeed, the February 7th newsletter of the National Council for Teacher Quality (NCTQ) — a consistent supporter of the demise of all things that smack of university-based teacher preparation — quietly and somewhat humbly admitted that short-cut alternative certification programs like the New York Teaching Fellows and Teach for America may not be the best idea since “sliced bread.” However, the authors of the NCTQ in this recent edition of their electronic rag, had to “cherry pick” a research finding to claim that the Teaching Fellows, after three years, “leave their traditional counterparts in the dust.”

I am not sure if the NCTQ crowd read the same Boyd, et.al. paper I read. (In any case, you should read the full paper, available for free (not $5 as advertised by NCTQ).

So let me set the record straight by first setting the context, something that the anti-teacher education crowd rarely does.

First of all, NYC employs 80,000 teachers, and because poor salaries and even poorer working conditions, the district has experienced horrific teacher shortages. In response, no surprise, the district has resorted to hiring increasingly less-prepared teachers to fill growing numbers of empty classrooms. In the spring of 2002, NYC employed 12,400 teachers with temporary licenses, and, as such, has relied on hiring teachers who enter through a variety of different pathways. Along with traditionally prepared or College Recommended (CR) teachers — primarily recruited from the local City University of New York (CUNY) system — NYC also brings in teachers from a variety of alternative, or short-cut routes into teaching, including highly recognized programs like Teach for America (TFA) and the NY Teaching Fellows program (Fellows). 

In 2004, the Fellows brought almost 2500 new teachers to New York City, while TFA provided less than 350.  Importantly, unlike most CR recruits, the Fellows and TFA recruits receive substantial support (e.g., stipends and tuition discounts) in taking the required teacher education courses they need to be certified.  As the researchers noted:

Participants enrolled in alternate route programs must fulfill the same requirements as all other candidates for teaching certificates, and thus by the end of their programs, they have completed a similar set of courses to those taken by graduates of college recommended programs…. However, the costs of entering teaching through an alternative route are substantially less for the individual teacher than the costs of traditional university-based teacher preparation.

This fact, ignored by those at NCTQ, has a great deal of bearing on why the students of Fellows (in middle, but not elementary school) eventually catch up to their peers taught by the more traditionally-prepared CR teachers. So let’s go through the major findings of the study as described by Don Boyd and his colleagues.

First, teachers from both the Fellows and TFA have clearly upped the ante on the academic qualifications of new recruits to NYC. In the 2003-2004 academic year, 16 percent of the CR recruits did not pass the general knowledge certification exam on their initial attempt, compared to none of the TFAers and less than two percent of the Fellows. This is good news. But as the researchers note both the Fellows and TFA pathways are “less costly for the student to complete,” prompting them to speculate that the academic quality of CR recruits would most likely increase if they too had the financial support provided to their alternative route counterparts. I guess the anti-teacher education crowd is quietly saying, “ouch.”

Second, the students of CR recruits do fare better in both elementary and middle school reading and language arts than their counterparts taught by temporary licensed teachers as well as the Fellows and TFAers. In fact, even temporary licensed teachers do better than Fellows. This makes sense. Although CR recruits graduate from a variety of “traditional” university-based teacher education programs (some very effective while others very ineffective), they are taught to some extent how to teach reading!  This one probably hurts the anti-teacher education crowd even more. 

Third, in elementary math, students of CR recruits initially outperform students of other teachers. The anti-teacher education crowd does not highlight this finding. The Fellows start out performing worse, but gain more over the first year than do other teachers. By the second year, their students perform as well as CR students. Students of TFA recruits make gains during their first year but they are “never statistically different from a CR teacher.”  This one forces a smile out of the anti-teacher education crowd.  But stay with me.

Fourth, in middle school math both Fellows and TFAers do a slightly better job than both CR and temporary teachers.  No surprise. Both the Fellows and TFAers have a lot more math in their backgrounds.  And this is a good reason to recruit them. I am all for alternative routes into teaching. Our schools do need more teachers who have a stronger background in math – but the anti-teacher education crowd just cannot own up to the fact that they need to also know how to teach as well. The Fellows, in particular, get better by Year 3 of study because by then they have received a bunch of teacher education. If the anti-teacher education crowd owned up to this fact, then they would need to go the doctor for some pain medication.

Fifth, when it comes to measuring the effects of different pathways into teaching, turnover matters; and it matters a lot. TFA recruits, compared to both CR and the Fellows, are far more likely to leave teaching after two years. By the third year of the study only 25 TFAers were still teaching! Over time the relative attrition of the Fellows grows so that it is roughly comparable to CR teachers, and actually exceeds them after three and fours years. The researchers assert boldly, “If one pathway consistently has higher turnover even if its teachers do well relative to those in other pathways with the same experience, the pathway may not be providing the most effective teachers, on average.” 

Some Fellows and TFAers as well as CR teachers can become effective teachers. But, if they do not stay around more than a few years then they cannot help very many students learn. The solutions to the problem — i.e.,  better salaries and working conditions  as well as better pre-service and more extensive induction programs — will cost money as well as a lot of bureaucratically and politically painful reallocation of money. The anti-teacher education crowd does not mention this fact.  More money for more teacher education is not the only response to the problem, but it is part of it. Just ask any number of education school deans who are trying to put into place more clinically-based teacher preparation programs, while their state funding keeps getting reduced.

Finally, let’s be real — and dead serious here. There is a lot of variation within pathways.  For example, about 25 percent of the so-called more traditionally prepared, college recommended recruits did their student teaching as teacher of record. What this means is that it is difficult to tease out the differential effects of traditional versus alternative preparation when traditional recruits take on the qualities associated with alternative ones and vice versa. It also means that, as the researchers note, “the variation in effectiveness within pathways is far greater than the average differences between pathways.” There is effective and ineffective traditional preparation; and there is effective and ineffective alternative preparation.

So what are the implications of this important study — which has a number of additional components that will shed even more light soon on these matters. The evidence here suggests that teacher preparation and certification does matter in improving teaching quality and student achievement, but what counts for teacher education and current licensing requirements at this time is not enough for the students who must be served. Although for the most part the CR teachers are more effective than the Fellows and TFAers, the differences are not large. I am not a fan of what still goes on inside of most “traditional” university-based teacher education programs.

However, there is no evidence at all in this report that current alternative route programs, as NCTQ suggests, are “the best place” to recruit secondary school teachers. The surveys and interviews that Boyd and company are conducting and analyzing will help policymakers and practitioners get smarter about what needs to be done to ratchet up the quality of teacher preparation, both traditional and alternative alike, and to dramatically improve the support systems (e.g., induction, professional development) and working conditions necessary for teachers to be effective. So let’s get beyond the traditional versus alternative debate and do what is right the students – who are the ultimate beneficiaries of teacher education.

The Emergency Teacher

Traditional Teacher Education and Alternative Certification: The Case of the Emergency Teacher

There still seems to be much controversy over the whether or not teachers should be prepared more extensively in university-based teacher education programs (with time to learn content, how to teach the content to diverse students, and significant opportunities to “practice” teach) or in short-cut alternative certification programs (with only having content knowledge) before one becomes the independent teacher of record. I find folks on both sides of the issue to be sensitive and somewhat intolerable of hard questions and any critique no matter how presented.

In a recent Education Week commentary I tried to lay out issues to suggest that the traditional prep versus alternative certification should not be an “either-or” but “and-both” strategy. To read the commentary in its entirety, please visit Education Week (requires registration): http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2005/10/19/08berry.h25.html

The issue, as far as I am concerned, is about what is best for the students who must be well-served and well-taught by teachers who know more than content and who will stay more than 1-2 years in the classroom.

Recently, Harry and Rosemary Wong tell the story of journalist Christina Asquith, who became an "emergency teacher" in inner-city Philadelphia and lived to write about it -- in a just-published book titled "The Emergency Teacher." http://teachers.net/wong/NOV05/

The Wongs, who befriended Asquith and co-wrote articles with her, include the first chapter of her book in this recent column at the Teachers.Net website. Asquith's experience raises serious questions about the notion that alternative rapid-entry teacher recruitment programs are a meaningful solution to teaching quality issues in our nation's hard-to-staff schools. Asquith is an amazing woman — a former journalist who served as a correspondent in Iraq and then proceeded to “fight for women’s rights in the Middle East.” But she also quickly learned that despite her content knowledge and extraordinary experiences, she was not ready to teach middle school English in the Philadelphia schools. She writes:

"On many days I truly loved teaching, but my lack of experience made the bad days too terrible for everyone involved. Overwhelmingly, I felt guilty, confused, and hopeless about the experience. Yet, in the back of my mind, I wondered if I hadn’t been thrown in cold, if I had had some training, any training—some support, could my brief career in teaching have turned out differently?"

Check out this amazing story — and consider the kind of preparation and support all teachers need.