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UM crafts national standards for teacher ed

February 4, 2012 by

The University of Michigan’s TeachingWorks is developing national standards for teacher education, reports Inside Higher Ed.

Aspiring English instructors were supposed to be mastering their craft in the teacher education class Francesca Forzani observed.

Forzani, a former English teacher, looked on in horror as the students spent an entire semester debating what a high school reading list should look like. More contemporary or classical literature? Perhaps multicultural books?

“They never practiced anything as simple as introducing students to a text,” said Forzani, who observed the class as part of an auditing process.

Forzani, associate director of TeachingWorks, said education professors discuss issues and theories but devote too little time to the practical challenges of teaching. As a result, more than 60 percent of teachers say they weren’t prepared for the classroom in a federal survey.

TeachingWorks will stress “leading a classroom discussion, crafting small-group projects and conferencing with parents”  and 16 other teaching skills.

. . . the goal of TeachingWorks is to highlight traits that every good teacher needs, whether the fourth-grade math class they’re leading is in Tacoma or Tampa.

Forzani hopes TeachingWorks’ standards will be used not just by college-based teacher education programs but also by alternatives such as Teach for America.

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Teach for America grows, but . . .

December 3, 2011 by

Teach for America‘s expansion is raising questions, reports AP. With experienced teachers facing layoffs, do high-poverty schools need inexperienced teachers, however bright, who commit for only two years in the classroom?

“There’s no question that they’ve brought a huge number of really talented people in to the education profession,” said Kati Haycock, president of The Education Trust, which advocates on behalf of low-income and minority children, and a longtime supporter of TFA.

But, she said, “Nobody should teach in a high poverty school without having already demonstrated that they are a fabulous teacher. For poor kids, education has to work every single year.”

High-poverty,  high-minority schools employ nearly twice as many teachers with fewer than three years’ experience, AP reports.

One third of TFA graduates are still teaching, according to the organization. Sixty percent work in education, including administration, starting new schools or developing policy.

In Why I did TFA and you shouldn’t, Gary Rubinstein explains why he no longer recruits for TFA. Twenty years ago, TFA recruits took “jobs that nobody else wanted,” he writes. The alternative to a “barely trained” TFA teacher was “a different substitute every day.”

The 2011 corps is nearly 6,000, twelve times as big as the cohorts from the early ’90s. Unfortunately, the landscape in education has changed a lot in the past twenty years. Instead of facing teacher shortages, we have teacher surpluses. There are regions where experienced teachers are being laid off to make room for incoming TFA corps members because the district has signed a contract with TFA, promising to hire their new people.

TFA has spawned arrogant education reformers who are “assisting in the destruction of public education,” Rubinstein charges.

In a follow-up post, he writes about how he’d fix TFA.

So here’s my plan: TFA becomes a three year program with the first year composed of training, student teaching, substitute teaching, and being paired up as an assistant to a corps member who is in her second year of the program, which is her first (of two) years of teaching.

First-year recruits would train at a university while grading papers, calling parents and subbing for a second-year TFA teacher, he proposes.

You will tutor kids after school. If necessary, you will cook dinner for the teacher you assist. First year teaching is a two-person job and you will be the behind the scenes person who does a lot of the dirty work so that the second year corps member can succeed. You will also be subbing throughout your city. Perhaps you have to sub twice a week. Do that for a year and you will have no trouble facing your actual classes in your second year.

With a year of preparation — and an assistant — the first year of teaching wouldn’t be so traumatic, he writes. Perhaps more people would want to remain as teachers, building on their first two years of experience.

 

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Teach for America outperforms in Tennessee

November 4, 2011 by

Teach for America teachers in Memphis and Nashville outperformed both experienced and new teachers, according to a state report card on teacher training. Teachers trained at Nashville’s Lipscomb University also did well.

Nine teacher training programs, including Tennessee State University, University of Tennessee-Martin, Middle Tennessee State and the Memphis Teacher Residency were cited for failing to compete with the quality of new teachers from other programs.

Memphis Teacher Residency, which recruits college graduates from other careers, posted low scores for high school teachers but relatively high scores for teachers in grades four through eight.  

 

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Study links TFA selection criteria to gains

August 8, 2011 by

Teach for America teachers rated high on academic achievement, leadership and perseverance are more effective math teachers in grades three through eight, concludes a new study (pdf) by Will Dobbie of Harvard. Leadership and belief in TFA goals was linked to English gains, but less clearly. Teacher Beat reports:

TFA selects its recruits through a detailed selection process that uses a mix of scored assessments, including essays, a group activity, recommendations, and a sample teaching lesson.

The qualities it measures include: achievement (academic GPA or work performance), leadership (performance in leadership role), perseverance (ability to work through obstacles), critical thinking (outlining solutions to problems methodically), organization (attention to deadlines and clarity of instruction), motivational ability (ability to keep students on task), respect (attitudes toward low-income individuals), and fit (whether the candidate believes TFA’s goals are attainable).

Critical thinking, organizational ability, motivation, and respect for others were not linked to classroom effectiveness.  However, students in third through fifth grade taught by a teacher who scored higher on the respect measure were less likely to have a behavior infraction.

 

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A corps of change agents

February 18, 2011 by

Teach for America‘s former teachers have formed a powerful corps of education change agents, according to  an Education Next study.

While much of the debate around Teach For America (TFA) in recent years has focused on the effectiveness of its nontraditional recruits in the classroom, the real story is the degree to which TFA has succeeded in producing dynamic, impassioned, and entrepreneurial education leaders.

“ TFA is one among a small cadre of organizations that currently includes New Leaders for New Schools, Education Pioneers, and Teach Plus” that are developing education leaders.  It’s an explicit part of TFA’s mission.

Recently, TFA started a new program, the Social Entrepreneurship Initiative, which explicitly promotes innovation and entrepreneurship in the education sector. The program facilitates connections between alumni interested in starting education ventures with established social entrepreneurs. The initiative supports TFA alumni who are applying for fellowships such as Echoing Green and the Mind Trust, provides tools for developing fundraising plans and grant proposals, and publishes a newsletter that includes information about funding opportunities and management strategies.

The KIPP network,  YES Prep Public Schools, New Schools for New Orleans and The New Teacher Project were founed by TFA alumni.

The study looked at founders of entrepreneurial education organizations. Where did they start?  TFA was the most common answer with fewer leaders coming from San Francisco Public Schools, Newark Public Schools, Chicago Public Schools, AmeriCorps, the White House Fellows program, McKinsey & Company, and the United States Department of Education.  Top managers also came from KIPP, founded by TFA alumni, and from consulting firms and large urban school districts.

It seems clear that explanatory factors include the criteria by which TFA recruits, the organization’s strong and purposive culture, the skills that corps members develop, and the opportunities provided to alumni. Just to take one example, by providing talented young college grads with classroom experience, TFA confers upon them a degree of credibility that opens doors that might open less readily for others.

TFA looks for leadership ability in recruiting new corps members, the study notes. TFA alumni who become education entrepreneurs are more likely to have worked in New York City or the San Francisco area, which have strong entrepreneurial cultures. As education entrepreneurs, they tend to focus on instruction and staffing rather than finance or management.

TFA should be judged not only on whether its recruits continue as teachers but also on the impact of those who leave the classroom, the authors conclude.

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Accountability for education schools

January 19, 2011 by

How well are ed schools preparing tomorrow’s teachers? The National Center on Teacher Quality will evaluate the quality of the nation’s 1,400 education schools.

. . . very little is known about the quality of teacher preparation programs—their selectivity, the content and pedagogical knowledge that they demand that their teacher candidates master, or how well they prepare candidates for the rigors of the classroom.

The review will be based on 17 standards “based on the highest caliber research on education and best practices of states and countries with excellent education systems” and vetted by national experts in a variety of fields.

NCTQ field-tested the methodology in analyzing education schools in Texas and Illinois.

U.S. News & World Report will publish the review annually, starting in the fall of 2012.

Alternative routes to teaching will be included only if they’re housed at education schools, writes Teacher Beat. That will exclude Teach for America and district-created teacher-prep programs.

Selling the idea to education deans may be difficult, Teacher Beat notes.

NCTQ’s Texas review was criticized by deans there even before the results came out.

In Texas, deans objected to the fact that the ratings were based on reviews of syllabuses and materials culled from websites rather than in-depth visits to schools. They argued that important topics might not be listed on such outlines. The forthcoming reviews are going to be based on a similar methodology, so anticipate more back-and-forth in this vein. (In fairness to NCTQ, ed. schools grumbled in the past about accreditation visits, too.)

NCTQ’s review will look at how well would-be teachers learn classroom-management skills, understand assessment and demonstrate expertise in their content area, among other things. In addition, programs will be judged on how well student teaching experiences are organized and whether the program collects data on graduates’ performance in the classroom.

Barnett Berry writes about building the 21st-century teaching profession in Ed Week.

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TFA recruits produce higher scores

December 4, 2010 by

Teach for America recruits are the most effective teachers in Tennessee, except for math teachers from Vanderbilt University, concludes a report card by the Tennessee Higher Education Commission.

By contrast, reading scores were low for students taught by teachers trained at the University of Memphis, University of Tennessee-Chattanooga, UT-Martin and several smaller colleges, reports the Memphis Commercial Appeal.

Teach for America, which recruits high-performing college graduates to the classroom from all disciplines, racked up the highest student scores among new teachers in reading, science and social studies.

Even compared to students of veteran teachers, students of TFA teachers had the highest test scores in reading. Vanderbilt teachers’ students took top honors in math.

The report card analyzes student test score data for public school teachers who have been on the job up to three years.

The Tennessee Board of Regents now requires education majors to complete one year as a student teacher, instead of a partial semester, and to pass an evaluation based on tapes of their teaching.

University of Memphis, one of the eight teacher training programs that rated low in effectiveness, may raise admissions standards for prospective teachers, a spokesman said. But that will be balanced with its “public mission.”  I think that means producing black teachers.

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RIP for HQT?

October 1, 2010 by

“No Child Left Behind’s highly qualified teachers provision deserves to die,” writes Mike Petrilli on Education Gadfly.

In a ruling last week, the Ninth Circuit said Teach For America teachers and others with alternative certification should not be considered “highly qualified” while they work toward state certification. A public-interest law firm had challenged the practice, complaining that low-income, minority students are more likely to be taught by uncertified “interns.”

The law’s wording is ambiguous, Petrilli writes, though Congress signaled its intent by supporting alternative certification in the same bill. Instead of appealing to the Supreme Court or waiting for NCLB to be reauthorized, Congress should kill the “highly qualified teachers” provision, Petrilli argues.

Everyone knows it’s a meaningless designation. Nobody will defend its focus on paper credentials. The conversation has moved on to teacher “effectiveness” as measured by student learning and other meaningful indicators. Yet in the real world of real schools, HQT is still the law of the land, wreaking havoc every day. It continues to make teachers jump through unnecessary hoops. It continues to tie the hands of charter schools that have to demonstrate that their teachers have requisite “subject matter knowledge”—never mind the autonomy charters are supposed to receive. And now it’s causing material harm to Teach For America, one of the best things our education system has going.

Don’t count alternative certification out just yet, writes Teacher Beat.

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Teachers take over schools

September 8, 2010 by

Across the country, teachers are taking over schools, reports the New York Times.  In Newark, a group of  Teach for America veterans are running a public K-8 school, Brick Avon Academy, as teacher-leaders. The “principal teacher,” Charity Haygood, teaches every day, as do two vice principals.

While they are in charge of disciplining and evaluating staff members, they plan to defer all decisions about curriculum, policies, hiring and the budget to a governance committee made up largely of teachers elected by colleagues.

. . . Teachers have more say over what they teach, and starting next year they will have more time to work with children when they introduce a longer day.

Founders were given a low-scoring school in a low-income, high-crime neighborhood.  They plan to turn Brick Avon into an International Baccalaureate school and to require Mandarin as well as Spanish.

Los Angeles has turned over 29 city schools to teacher-led groups, who beat out established charter operators. Detroit is opening a teacher-run elementary school. Boston Teachers Union opened a teacher-run school last year “with teachers ordering supplies, giving feedback to one another and deciding whose hours to reduce to save money.”

Until recently, most teacher-led schools have been charters.  It’s harder to change the administrative structure in a district-run school.

Tim McDonald, an associate with Education Evolving, a policy group in St. Paul that supports teacher-led schools, said studies showed that when teachers were given control — much like doctors or lawyers running their own practices — schools had higher morale, less turnover, more efficient decision-making and greater motivation to improve.

Still, Mr. McDonald was skeptical that a truly collaborative model could succeed widely in school districts, unless it was somehow freed from the traditional bureaucracy.

“The question is whether teachers have the patience to do the ‘adminis-trivia,’ ” said James Lytle, a former principal and superintendent and now an education professor at University of Pennsylvania.

The union-run UFT Charter School in East New York, Brooklyn, has run into problems. Two principals resigned after clashing with teachers, and recent test scores have been disappointing; only 22 percent of last year’s eighth graders passed state tests in English and 13 percent in math, compared with citywide rates of 37.5 percent in English and 46.3 percent in math.

Teachers are running schools in Minnesota, Wisconsin and Denver, reports Public School Review.  Some are charters and some are district-run but nearly all enroll primarily low-income, minority students.  Results are mixed for the Minnesota and Wisconsin schools, writes Beth Hawkins in Education Next.

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'Study laundering' on TFA

July 27, 2010 by

“Weaponized” education research and “study laundering” are illustrated by a Great Lakes Center study knocking Teach for America for high turnover and “mixed” performance, writes Eduwonk.

Half of TFA teachers leave after two years and 80 percent leave after three, the study says. However,  the researchers use data from studies that conflate TFA teachers who leave their original school placement with those who leave the teaching profession, Eduwonk charges. A 2008 Harvard study (pdf), found that 61 percent of TFA teachers stay in teaching beyond the two-year commitment.

Teach For America surveys its alumni regularly and the most recent survey found that 65 percent of Teacher For America’s 20,000 alumni remain in education, with 32 percent continuing as teachers. And remember, that’s a survey of alums going back almost two decades now so that one in three figure should be viewed in that context as well as the larger context of TFA’s mission.

On the performance issue, studies that use rigorous methodology find that “Teach For America teachers perform as well or better than other teachers, not only emergency certified teachers but traditionally trained ones and veterans,” Eduwonk writes, including lots of link to research studies. The results are not mixed.

By “study laundering,” Eduwonk means getting the mainstream media — in this case,  the  Washington Post’s Valerie Strauss and the New York Times’ Michael Winerip – to report uncritically on the study without mentioning other research or noting that Great Lakes’ board “is made up of people with a track record of trashing Teach For America and NEA affiliates fighting to keep TFA out of various states.”

Update:  Another survey finds TFA teachers are more likely to leave their original school if they’re assigned to teach multiple subjects or grades or out of their field, reports Teacher Beat.  Sixty-one percent teach for more than two years, the study found, matching earlier results.

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