Teacher Ed Makes a Difference

I've been away for a month or so but I thought this item was a good one to come back with. It's from Education Week:

Study: Teaching Credentials Still Matter

By Debra Viadero

If you listen to a lot of policy discussions on education, chances are that you've heard one scholar or another stand up to talk about how teacher credentials, such as holding a traditional license or having earned a master's degree, don't seem to matter much when it comes to improving student achievement.

Duke University researcher Helen F. Ladd says that there are two problems with those studies. The studies are: 1) old, and 2) focused mostly on elementary school children.

To gather newer data on the impact of teacher credentials and characteristics on high school students' achievement, Ladd and her research partners took a look at scores from the end-of-course exams that all high school students are required to take in North Carolina. They looked in particular at statewide data for four cohorts of 9th and 10th graders for whom they could find and match up data on their teachers. (The final sample included tens of thousands of students.)The bottom line, the researchers found, was that at the high school level, most measurable teacher credentials do indeed matter. And they have a large enough impact on student achievement, Ladd and her colleagues say, to suggest that they ought to figure into policymakers' decisions on how to raise the quality of instruction in schools.

Read the rest here.

NRC Report on Teacher Ed Finally Appears

Back in 2004, Congress commissioned the National Research Council to do a study of teacher preparation. Given the impact of the NRC report on the teaching of reading, that seemed like an important (possibly even alarming) development. As the months and years went by, I would occasionally visit the NRC website to see if they were making any progress. Once in a while the minutes of a meeting would be posted but eventually it looked as though the project had disappeared into the bureaucratic ether. I thought perhaps it had lost its funding. (I realize that admitting I was following this so closely shows what a nerd I am.) But today the study finally appeared. You can read about it in Education Week or buy a copy here. Now, in 2010, it doesn't seem quite so important, but I'm not sure why.

On the Verge

Interesting article in the NY Times about how the State of NY is considering allowing entities other than schools or colleges of education to offer degrees in education. Key quote from Arthur Levine: “Education schools are on the verge of losing their franchise.”

CEE Member in the News

I finally got around to reading the recent article about Teach for America in the online magazine Slate and was pleased to see CEE member Deborah Appleman quoted at some length:

Deborah Appleman, the chairwoman of education studies at Carleton College, shadowed a former student of hers through the summer training of TFA's first class in 1990. She came away disappointed and has been been a persistent critic ever since. She discourages her students from applying and refuses to write letters of recommendation for them.
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Critics like Appleman . . . say that TFA's premise—that corps members can succeed without substantial training in the classroom—is "insulting" to professionally trained teachers. Without such training, she's convinced, TFA teachers often disserve their students, and themselves, because their struggles discourage them from staying in teaching. Too high a share (30 percent that first year, 12 percent on average overall) leave before completing their two-year commitment, Appleman argues.

You might also want to take a look at Barnett Berry's blog post at District Administrator in which he does the math:

Lincoln Caplan, who penned the Slate exposé of TFA, reports that over 15 years the non-profit has spent $500 million (30 percent from the government) to recruit a few thousand teachers who will remain in the classroom no more than two years. (Caplan’s investigation reveals that over a decade and a half about 8,000 TFA recruits remain in education, with no more than one-half actually teaching children.) It has been difficult to get the accurate numbers on TFA, but it looks like Caplan's research would signify that TFA is spending about $125,000 per teacher!

"One test should really not . . . " (You complete the sentence)

From the Boston Globe:

Minority scores lag on teaching test

Panel to study failure rate, bias complaints

By Tracy Jan, Globe Staff | August 19, 2007

More than half the black and Hispanic applicants for teaching jobs in Massachusetts fail a state licensing exam, a trend that has created a major obstacle to greater diversity among public school faculty and stirred controversy over the fairness of the test.

The minority failure rate has been demonstrably higher than among whites since the test's inception nearly a decade ago, according to state statistics, which show that 52 percent of Hispanic applicants and 54 percent of black applicants fail the writing portion of the exam. By comparison, 23 percent of whites fail. Black and Hispanic teachers also lag behind white teachers in major subject tests such as English, history, and math.

The problem has become so acute that a state task force of teachers, professors, hiring directors, and state education officials convened last week to begin examining why minorities fare so much worse on the tests.

"One of the fallouts which is particularly upsetting in our expe rience across the colleges is fewer and fewer students of color are even going into teaching because word has gotten out that these tests are very difficult for them," said Sally Dias, a vice president at Emmanuel College in Boston who is a member of the panel. "One test should really not be a determinant of someone's career."

TFA and Teacher Retention

Barnett Barry who runs the Center for Teaching Quality has a thoughtful post at his blog about Teach for America and the tendency of TFA teachers to leave teaching as soon as their two-year commitment is up:

Finding a Better Way to Recruit, Prepare, and Retain Good Teachers

This past week both the Washington Post and CNN posted stories on Teach for America (TFA). Since its inception in 1990, TFA has done a great deal of important work to recruit elite universities’ graduates, entice them to teach in the most underserved communities, and encourage them to bring energy and commitment to school reform. Last year, 17,000 college graduates applied for the program, including 12 percent of Yale’s graduating seniors. Only one in eight TFA applicants was selected for the program. With our nation’s public schools needing to hire 200,000 new teachers annually, why not TFA?

However, TFA’s five-week crash preparation program and its two-year enlistment commitment do not work in the long-term interest of the children. Because of its truncated training regime, TFA recruits do not learn much about teaching literacy, developing and using new assessments, and working with students whose first language is not English.

Read the rest here.

Support for Teacher Education?

This could be important, provided it gets funded at a meaningful level and doesn't have too many strings attached.

From Education Week, June 20, 2007
Senate Panel OKs Higher Education Bills Aimed at Boosting Teacher Preparation, College Access

By Alyson Klein

The Senate education committee today approved sweeping bills aimed at encouraging colleges to partner with struggling school districts to provide extensive classroom experience for prospective teachers, and boosting college access for disadvantaged students.

The teacher-training provision, part of a broad, long-awaited measure reauthorizing the Higher Education Act, would combine the three current grant programs that help states and universities prepare and recruit K-12 teachers into a single initiative that would enable colleges to collaborate with high-need districts.

Under the legislation, which the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee approved on a bipartisan vote of 20-0, colleges and districts would receive grants to enable master’s degree students to spend one year working alongside effective mentor teachers in high-need schools while the students took their graduate-level education courses.

More here.

In Washington

The House Subcommittee on Higher Education, Lifelong Learning and Competitiveness met yesterday to discuss teacher preparation. Washington seems to be fairly interested in this issue, but it's hard to tell where the interest will lead. As usual, the focus seems to be on using federal dollars to lever change. For me, the big question is how any federal moves will interact with the state licensing apparatus and with NCATE. Here's the whole story at Inside Higher Ed.

New Teacher Preparation Guidelines Available

The 2006 edition of the Guidelines for the Preparation of Teachers of English Language Arts is now available for download and printing (as a PDF file) at the CEE site. Thanks to Lois Stover and the Standing Committee on Teacher Preparation and Certification for their hard work.

Should Law Schools Be More Like Ed Schools?

This week's Chronicle of Higher Education has an interesting piece about how law schools are trying to find a way to give students more "hands-on practice." It also suggests that there is a problematic similarity in curriculum from law school to law school. So does this mean law schools are in need of something like student teaching, and that diversity across programs is good? Maybe schools of education know something.

A Plea for Real-World Training in Law Schools
Carnegie Foundation report suggests more focus on clients, less on Socratic dialogues
By KATHERINE MANGAN

While medical, business, and other professional schools frequently reinvent their curricula to require that students get hands-on practice before beginning their careers, law-school teaching has remained remarkably unchanged over the past century.

As a result, many students graduate with little experience working with real clients and an inadequate grounding in ethical and social issues, according to a new report from the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.

The report concludes that the Socratic "case dialogue" method that dominates law-school teaching does a good job of teaching students legal-reasoning skills but does little to prepare them to work with people or juggle morally complex issues.

"The gap between teaching students to think like a lawyer and act like a lawyer — especially in ethical situations — is greater than ever," said Lee S. Shulman, president of the Carnegie Foundation and one of the report's authors.

The curriculum is also extremely similar from school to school, which creates "a striking conformity in outlook and habits of thought among law-school graduates," according to the report, which was distributed and discussed at this month's annual meeting of the Association of American Law Schools.

(You can find the entire article here, but you'll need to be a subscriber or have access through your institution's library to see it.)

Darling-Hammond on Teacher Quality

From Education Week, January 10, 2007:

A Marshall Plan for Teaching
What It Will Really Take to Leave No Child Behind

By Linda Darling-Hammond

Views about the No Child Left Behind Act are currently as divided as Berlin before the wall came down. But whatever one thinks about the 5-year-old federal law, it’s clear that developing more-skillful teaching is a sine qua non for attaining higher and more equitable achievement for students in the United States. Without teachers who have sophisticated skills for teaching challenging content to diverse learners, there is no way that children from all racial and ethnic, language, and socioeconomic backgrounds will reach the high academic standards envisioned by the law. For this reason, one of the most important aspects of the No Child Left Behind legislation is its demand for a “highly qualified” teacher for every child.

Research indicates that expert teachers are the most important—and the most inequitably distributed—school resource. In the United States, however, schools serving more than 1 million of our highest-need students are staffed by a parade of underprepared and inexperienced teachers who know little about effective instruction, and even less about teaching English-language learners and students with disabilities. Many of these teachers enter the classroom with little training and leave soon after, creating greater instability in their wake. Meanwhile, affluent students receive teachers who are typically better prepared than their predecessors, further widening the achievement gap.

Read the rest here.

Report Suggests Scrapping Current Approach to Teacher Ed

On the policy front, the National Center on Education and the Economy has just released a report from their New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce. Titled “Tough Choices or Tough Times,” the report recommends (among other things) that current policies regarding teacher education “be scrapped” and replaced by state agencies that can contract with any group(s) they wish to provide teacher education. Also recommended are grade ten tests that would channel students into particular educational or vocational paths and shifting the “ownership” of schools from local school boards to independent contractors. Given the NCEE’s influence in the past, this may be a report worth looking at. (Note that only the executive summary is available on the web.) And after you’ve read the summary, you might also want to read Jerry Bracey’s critique.