Each year, approximately 240,000 new teachers are hired. Ninety percent of new those teachers come from traditional teacher preparation programs. As New Schools for New Orleans’ Neerav Kinsgland and others have pointed out, reforming schools of education is one of the big, immediate levers for school improvement at scale.
U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has likewise called the need to reform teacher education “a national priority and a critical concern.” And yet the Department of Education’s recently announced plan for teacher education reform and improvement falls severely short of spurring the “revolutionary change” Duncan has called for. The plan includes three major components:
- Institutional reporting and state accountability: The effectiveness of teacher-prep programs will be measured by the growth of students taught by their graduates, by placement of graduates, and by principal satisfaction surveys.
- A teaching fellows program: The plan would allocate funds to states that link teacher certification with teacher performance (and link student achievement to teachers) and would provide scholarships to candidates studying at top-rated schools.
- Building the ranks of highly qualified minority teachers: The plan proposes a competitive grant program to incentivize minority serving institutions to reform and strengthen their teacher preparation programs.
The first point – about measuring teacher outcomes – is a major pillar of the proposal and appears to be driven by the implicit belief that setting outcome goals will spur schools of education to explore new ways of reaching those goals. In other words, the proposal looks like an indirect attempt to spur innovation in the way teachers are prepared.
But the idea that transparent reporting will spur change in schools of education is deeply flawed. Apart from the obvious problem that most states are ill prepared to use data to rate program effectiveness (as the proposal requires), the requirement to report results lacks teeth in terms of driving innovation or reform. The proposal offers no clearly defined consequences for poor performance, meaning that poor actors have little incentive to do better. And while the teaching fellows program and efforts to build the ranks of minority teachers are laudable, they do not address baseline questions about the quality of incoming degree candidates nor do they do anything to incentivize schools to teach the skillsets that will help them be most effective.
A more straightforward and immediate approach to reforming teacher preparation, based upon a decent evidence base and common sense, would be to:
- Incentivize states and schools of education to raise the bar for admissions. In America just 14 percent of our teachers working in urban schools come from the top third of their high school classes. Yet research conducted by McKinsey found that in the highest performing school systems around the world have a high bar for admissions into the teaching profession. Raising the bar for admissions ensures our best and brightest are becoming teachers, which will also help to foster the idea of teaching as a prestigious profession.
- Focus on building the skills of educators to diagnose student learning needs and react accordingly. Teachers are knowledge workers and should be trained to understand data on student learning gaps and make adjustments to instruction. The best teacher training programs in America do this already, as do the best systems in the world. It’s high time our teacher training programs get on the bandwagon.
We need reforms that explicitly address teacher training standards and requirements, not those that linger on backward-looking data. Disappointingly, this latest DOE proposal remains firmly entrenched in the category of “evolutionary tinkering” that Duncan has rightfully disparaged.
