Are teacher-training ratings useful?
Better teacher education needed to improve our students’ success Harmful rules will punish students and instructors
Florida is expected to hire nearly 5,400 K-12 teachers this year. Most will be newly minted graduates from the state’s teacherprep programs.
Over the course of their careers, these new teachers will have a huge impact on tens of thousands of Florida students. That’s why it’s so important that they be trained well.
Unfortunately, the National Council on Teacher Quality has found big gaps in the training that Florida programs provide. Only a quarter of the programs we examined provide elementary teachers with a solid foundation in reading instruction. None gives elementary teachers the training in math they need to help their students get ready to excel in science and technology. No Florida program we looked at makes sure that its teacher candidates have a strong student-teaching experience with plenty of feedback and an effective mentor teacher.
It’s not overreaching to say that poor teacher training is helping to widen the achievement gap between children growing up in poverty and their middle-class peers. The lack of accountability for teacher-prep programs in an age when so much is measurable and knowable goes a long way toward explaining why we continue to be frustrated by entrenched poor student achievement. As a nation, we’ve focused heavily on important reforms, such as raising expectations for students, imposing higher graduation and promotion standards, developing meaningful achievement tests, building teacher evaluation systems and rewriting laws and language in union contracts.
But until recently, little attention had been paid to the institutions that train teachers how to do the work that is used to measure their performance — and ultimately judge the success of their students.
The more recent calls for teacher-prep programs to better prepare teachers for the 21st-century classroom have never been louder. Even the federal government has recognized the need for more accountability — proposing new regulations to bring transparency to program performance.
Teachers themselves are sounding the alarm. Only a third of new teachers say that their programs prepared them well.
Florida is a leader among states in having taken important steps to strengthen teacher training and hold programs accountable for the teachers they produce. Earlier this year, the Florida State Board of Education passed new regulations to rate teacher-prep programs on a variety of measures — including student growth as measured by test scores. This builds on accountability measures the state already had in place, including publishing an annual report card on programs’ quality.
The new regulations should fit well with the U.S. Department of Education’s proposed regulations that would require states to rate teacher-prep programs based on multiple criteria, including student learning.
It’s true that there are limitations to using student test results to measure the quality of teacher-prep programs, but neither Florida nor the feds are proposing to use student learning as the sole indicator. A comprehensive accountability system takes into account multiple metrics — including surveys of graduates and those new grads’ employers, placement and retention rates, as well as student learning as measured by standardized tests.
Aspiring teachers, the districts that hire them and the general public deserve the kind of information that this new focus on accountability would provide. The new federal rules are expected this fall, if the feds stick to their plan and Congress doesn’t get in the way. These rules should go a long way toward taking the guesswork out of identifying teachers who are ready to teach well — from the start.
Ignorance about how well institutions train our children’s teachers definitely is not bliss.
Kate Walsh is president of the National Council on Teacher Quality.
Every child deserves a high-quality education, starting with teachers who have the tools and conditions they need to meet the needs of all their students. That’s why it’s so important to invest in teacher preparation that ensures every teacher is as prepared as possible on his or her first day in the classroom.
Sadly, the U.S. Department of Education’s proposed regulations for teacher-preparation programs do little to move us closer to these goals.
The proposed regulations require states to rate teacher-preparation programs based on how many of their candidates go into and stay in teaching, and on the test scores of the students of their graduates. In using these metrics, the regulations suggest that no other factors cause someone to get or leave a teaching job or our profession, and that nothing except a teacher’s preparation is responsible for how well a student does on a test. This not only defies common sense, but could end up harming students.
Let’s start with the use of K-12 test scores. Right now in Florida, the tests scores of just two or three students taught by graduates of a teacher-preparation program are being used to evaluate that entire program. You don’t need a degree in statistics to understand why that doesn’t make sense.
The use of complex value-added models that turn students into data points and teachers into algorithms also would be mandated. VAM and high-stakes tests were never designed to tell us anything about the work of faculty in a primary or secondary school, much less at the local college of education. Yet, here we are, in this era of overtesting, talking about increasing the emphasis on standardized tests instead of moving toward a system that includes multiple ways to measure the quality and success of the programs preparing tomorrow’s teachers for our nation’s classrooms.
Now let’s turn to the use of teacher retention as a way to measure the quality of teacher-preparation programs. While teacher turnover is a big problem, there are many reasons why teachers leave the profession, including challenging school climates, low pay, inadequate support, overtesting and limited paths for professional advancement. How would more punitive measures for teacher-preparation programs fix these problems?
In order to assess their graduates and the students they are teaching, the proposed regulations could make teacherpreparation programs follow their graduates wherever they happen to land. Here in Florida, approximately one-half of new teachers head to other states. That means Florida’s teacher-preparation programs may have to figure out how to follow graduates outside the state — without any funding or guidance on just how to do that in a variety of state environments.
Finally, under the proposed regulations, teacher-preparation programs that send graduates to teach in high-need schools could receive lower ratings, lose funding or even be shut down. Our nation’s highneed schools typically have high teacher turnover and low student test scores due to factors such as poverty, segregation and inequitable funding. With more than half of public-school students living in poverty, and with a growing number of Englishlanguage learners concentrated in urban, high-need schools, we need to be doing more to help prepare teachers.
We know what is needed to help prepare prospective teachers: universal and rigorous entry standards into the profession, as in law and medicine, with programs providing students with the comprehensive course work and real-world clinical experience they need to be able to demonstrate teaching competency.
There is no quick fix for ensuring that every teacher is prepared for the challenging work of teaching. Instead of punishing teachers with more harmful regulations, we must raise up the teaching profession while improving working conditions and professional opportunities for all teachers.
Randi Weingarten is president of the American Federation of Teachers.