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Researchers have looked at just about every possible determinant of teaching success, and it seems there’s nothing on a prospective teacher’s résumé that indicates how he or she will do in the classroom. While some qualifications boost performance a little bit—National Board certification seems to help, though a master’s degree in education does not—they just don’t improve it very much.
Ray Fisman in Slate on “Why are public schools so bad at hiring good instructors?”
The New York Sun’s Elizabeth Green reports NYC Schools Chancellor Joel Klein wishes for his Department of Education to have the authority to certify teachers and principals. Ed schools have that exclusive franchise right now. Flypaper says the Boys of Fordham were at the Excellence in Education summit in Orlando where Klein discussed this idea, and will have more to say about it shortly. Could get interesting.
Quick and the Ed’s Kevin Carey turns in a nicely written analysis of why Teach for America rubs some folks in education the wrong way:
I think there’s a sense among some that TFAers are parachuting into the teaching profession for a little while, grabbing a piece of moral authority, and then using it to further their already-privileged lives. A teacher like my aunt reading about state dinners for Prince Charles and limousines lined up outside the Waldorf-Astoria might wonder, not unreasonably, why it never occurred to all those rich and famous people to recognize or support her lifetime of service.
Another issue, says Carey is professionalism. It’s hard to argue that teaching should stand alongside law and medicine in professional stature when, as one commenter puts it “professions do not assign novices primary responsibility.”
In an op-ed touting Teach for America earlier this week, the Wall Street Journal noted, “Unions keep saying the best people won’t go into teaching unless we pay them what doctors and lawyers and CEOs make.”
Really? Which union keeps saying this. Names and dates, please.
The decision of the judge is arbitrary, capricious and final, but Eduwonk’s booker prize for the best $5 billion plan for ed reform goes to an idea to create a teacher apprenticeship plan.
Create a new role for the classroom called an “Associate Teacher” that works with a teacher for 2 years before becoming a full-fledged teacher. Every classroom team would include a teacher, an associate teacher and a teacher assistant. It would cost a lot of money to run, but would help meet the needs of all children.
A fine idea. Many elite private schools structure their classrooms in exactly this way. Count me in on any plan that raises the experience level and quality of teachers in our toughest schools. Still, I wonder how it would square with Teach For America and other alt cert programs, who train their teachers to be leaders, not associates.
Good classroom management and the ability to create a positive learning environment are the starting point of student achievement in disorderly schools, and it takes a while to hone your craft. It’s simply too much to expect neophytes to have it down right out of the chute.
More: Flypaper’s Coby Loup is underwhelmed.
Ezra Koenig, the lead singer of indie rock darlings Vampire Weekend taught for a year in NYC with Teach for America. (Hat tip: an anonymous poster at Eduwonk, who provided this link).
9th grade students in Philadelphia high schools are more likely than their upper-grade peers to be taught by inexperienced, uncertified teachers according to a new study highlighted by Education Week.
While it’s hard to say what impact such teacher-assignment patterns have on students’ academic growth, the researchers found that, in Philadelphia at least, having a less-qualified teacher may have a detrimental effect on students’ attendance. All things being equal, the study showed, students taking at least two classes taught by novice, uncredentialed teachers miss an average of two more school days a year than peers with more-qualified teachers.
I’m late pointing out this story, but given the recent discussion here and elsewhere about the importance (or lack thereof) of veteran teachers for at-risk students, this study is germane.
Another example of the limits of good intentions, and the very real hurdles new teachers face in driving student achievement in our toughest schools. Baltimore Sun columnist Dan Rodricks writes about Ed Morman, a mid-career switcher who entered the Baltimore City Teaching Residency, but is now admitting defeat and quitting the field.
“The [teaching] job was the hardest I’ve had, by far,” Morman wrote, “but the potential for job satisfaction was far greater than I’d ever felt before. I told the kids that I quit teaching because I needed to make more money. This isn’t true. … I quit because of the stress I felt. The main cause of the stress was the kids themselves. I could never rise above the feeling of humiliation that I felt each day when I tried to address 20 or 25 kids and might find none of them paying attention to me. I seethed when I asked a student to stop talking and heard the response, ‘Get out of my face.’ So often I stood in the classroom wishing I could be anywhere else.
“I try to get a class to come to order while one kid is jumping on a second, a third calls out my name asking me for a pencil, a fourth demands that I let her go to the bathroom and a fifth needs to go see Miss Smith, while a sixth needs a pass to the nurse’s office and a seventh starts making silly, repetitive noises. … One day a cheap calculator hit the wall just above my head. Another day, it was a Jell-O cup, whose contents dripped down the wall and stained the picture of Harriet Tubman I had hanging on a bulletin board. …I had a meltdown after seeing how poorly my kids did on a standardized test.
Typically Morman shoulders the blame himself for his failure. “One thing I absorbed from my otherwise inadequate training is that it was up to me to make a difference,” he notes. “And I did make a difference, but not enough to sustain me through the nonsense.”
A sad, achingly familiar tale.
Subject matter expertise or pedagogy? Which matters more for a teacher? Arizona says subject matter matters, at least enough to allow the experts to teach with a mere modicum of training, according to the Arizona Republic:
Beginning this fall, working engineers and scientists will sign on as adjunct teachers in a new pilot program. These professionals can teach one class of calculus or algebra daily after 36 hours of teacher training and a background check. Unlike adjunct instructors in universities, professionals teaching in high schools will not get paid. The state calls the new volunteer program the “Adjunct Teachers Initiative. Arizona’s teachers union calls it insulting.
“What I see coming from the adjunct teaching proposal is that teaching isn’t really more than some kind of community service that you do when you’re feeling generous,” Andrew Morrill, vice president of the Arizona Education Association tells the paper.
On the other hand, I’d rather have the expert than an “emergency teacher” with no subject expertise, apparently Arizona’s most common response to a shortage.
Last week, I posted a memo to Wendy Kopp, suggesting a new way to deploy Teach for America corps members—and get top veteran teachers in front of our highest need classrooms. The Teach for America founder emailed a thoughtful reply over the weekend:
Many thanks for all the generous sentiments in your blog entry, which I appreciate. As for your recommendation, as you might guess, I don’t think this would be a good thing for urban and rural kids. It is a rare person who has what it takes to excel as a teacher in a low-income community, and it’s not at all a given that teachers who do well in more privileged communities will do well in urban and rural areas. The most important thing for kids in low-income communities is that we recruit as many people as possible — whether new or experienced — who have the personal characteristics that differentiate successful teachers in high-poverty communities, and that we train and support them to be effective in meeting the extra needs of their students. The individuals who come to Teach For America are coming because they want to work with the nation’s most disadvantaged children (and it is unlikely that most of them would decide to channel their energy toward teaching in more privileged contexts), and in fact their motivation to level the playing field for them is one reason for their success. The recent Urban Institute study that looked at the impact of high school teachers in the state of North Carolina over a six-year period provides evidence that our strategy has a positive impact for kids; the study showed that the incremental impact of hiring a Teach For America corps member was three times the impact of having a teacher with three or more years of experience. Moreover, in addition to providing a critical source of excellent teachers for disadvantaged kids, our strategy of channelling the energy of the nation’s future leaders into urban and rural schools is important for the long-term effort to ensure educational excellence and equity. Teach For America is building a pipeline of leaders who are deeply committed to educational equity and deeply understand what it will take to ensure that children in low-income communities have the educational opportunities they deserve. Their initial teaching experience in under-resourced communities is foundational to their lifelong commitment to effecting the systemic changes necessary to ensure educational opportunity for all.
Wendy Kopp
CEO & Founder
Teach For America
