Clay Burell's Library tagged teacher_certification →  View Popular

One of the most comprehensive studies so far focuses on the effectiveness of teachers in New York City schools. The teachers
came from a variety of traditional university programs as well as Teach for America and the New York City Teaching Fellows
program. There were also those on a temporary license.

The study found that student achievement was helped most by having a certified teacher who had graduated from a university
program, had been teaching more than two years, and had a strong academic background. It also found that student achievement
was hurt by having inexperienced teachers on a temporary license – something more common in high-poverty schools.

One of the most comprehensive studies so far focuses on the effectiveness of teachers in New York City schools. The teachers
came from a variety of traditional university programs as well as Teach for America and the New York City Teaching Fellows
program. There were also those on a temporary license.

The study found that student achievement was helped most by having a certified teacher who had graduated from a university
program, had been teaching more than two years, and had a strong academic background. It also found that student achievement
was hurt by having inexperienced teachers on a temporary license – something more common in high-poverty schools.

Stronger Standards and Assessments

The department's 2010 budget also will help states develop and implement rigorous, college-ready academic achievement standards along with improved assessments, including assessments for students with disabilities and English language learners, to accurately measure students' knowledge and skills.

the six week training given to the Oakland Teaching Fellows combined. This program recruits young people (many in their early twenties) to fill the teaching vacancies in OUSD. The only applicant requirements are to possess a Bachelor’s degree, have a GPA of 2.75 or higher, pass two state teaching tests (the CBEST and CSET), and be willing to dive into an Oakland public school head first.

For a month an a half in the summer before they start full-time work in a school, participants learn about state standards, the foundations of teaching, and classroom management. They have discussions and activities about the challenges and benefits of teaching in a diverse educational setting. They work with current teachers in OUSD summer school classrooms, learn about lesson planning, and get a chance to help teach a summer school class. Then they are thrown to the wolves.

This paper briefly explains why a focus on effectiveness is needed and how it might work, and it describes current federal policy related to teacher quality. It then provides some new ideas about how federal policy can stimulate change at the state and local level to help states and districts move from a qualifications focus to an effectiveness focus: That is, a focus on a teacher’s ability to improve student learning as measured by both value-added measures and other measures. If an effectiveness approach is going to succeed, three things must be in place:



• State and district capacity to collect and use high-quality data
• Knowledge about how to use these data to inform human capital policies
• The political will to focus on teacher effectiveness

If education were a product and the United States were a corporation, we would try and figure out how other nations manage to succeed where we have clearly failed, and then beat them at their own game. Instead, many of America’s leading donors are lavishing their money on social entrepreneurs whose small, innovative programs don’t have a prayer of dealing with the problem at the scale that is needed.

Among the best known of these entrepreneurs are people like Wendy Kopp, founder of Teach for America, which recruits graduates of elite universities to spend two years teaching at some of the country’s worst schools. The line of limousines gathered for a recent fund-raising benefit the group held in New York reportedly went around an entire city block at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel. Five million dollars was raised in one night. Other well-known entrepreneurs include Green Dot and KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program), which operate charter schools.

Those are all worthwhile organizations, no question about it. Their leaders are smart, visionary, and very dedicated. But as exemplary as they are, small programs like these are not equal to the task. Teach for America accounts for just two-tenths of 1 percent of the new teachers entering our schools every year. The entire enrollment of the Green Dot schools is no larger than the enrollment of one typical high school in the Los Angeles Unified School District. KIPP schools, the object of enormous attention in the national news media, has an enrollment equal to three-hundredths of 1 percent of the 92,000 public schools in the United States.

The foundations, corporations, and wealthy individuals who support these organizations are well-intentioned, but their efforts amount to boutique grant making personally gratifying to those engaged in it, but irrelevant in practical terms compared with the education challenges the United States faces.

Other countries have not built highly effective and very efficient school systems by financing a handful of small, disruptive interventions. Not at all. They have developed policies that get results. It is the structure of those systems that account for their effectiveness.

To those of us who have studied these nations in detail for years, there is no mystery about what has to be done. America, too, needs to recruit teachers from the top one-third to one-fifth of college graduates. To get them, we need to pay them as much as the other professions they could just as easily choose to go into: medicine, law, architecture, accounting, engineering, and so on. We need to make sure the best of them can do very well for themselves without leaving teaching. We need to give them the same kind of control over the way their services are delivered to their clients as the other professions have over theirs, and that will mean turning virtually all of the decisions as to how the schools are run over to them.

By handsomely rewarding school faculties that produce smashing gains for their students and closing schools that fail to make strong progress, we can ensure that handing over the decision making is a wise move. But, if we do that, we will be making a big mistake if we continue to measure student progress with the cheap, minimum-competency tests the states now use. We need instead to adopt high-quality board examinations like those the most successful countries use, which can measure a student’s grasp of the concepts underlying the subject, the student’s creativity and capacity for innovation, as well as the student’s knowledge and ability to apply what he or she has learned to real-world problems. As many other countries have done long ago, we need to shift our financing system away from a reliance on the local property tax and toward a system that makes sure each and every student has the resources needed to get to internationally benchmarked standards.