Improving Teacher Education Programs

December 15, 2008 by dave

Many people interested in education reform, myself included, think that teacher quality has a huge impact on student achievement. If we could figure out which teacher education programs do the best job at preparing teachers for being successful to raising achievement and closing achievement gaps, we could help all these programs improve. That being the case, it makes one wonder why there isn't more discussion about evaluating the quality of these programs based on the impact their graduates have on student achievement.

I thought this New York Times editorial was very interesting.

For students to learn, they need well-trained teachers. Unfortunately, far too many teacher-preparation programs in this country are little more than diploma mills. As states and the federal government consider ways to fix this problem, they should look to Louisiana’s accountability-based reform efforts.

Louisiana already has required public- and private-teacher-education programs to offer more rigorous course work, and teachers must pass licensing exams in more subject areas than before.

The most striking innovation is an evaluation system that judges teacher-preparation programs based on how much their graduates improve student performances in important areas, including reading, math and science.

Once the evaluation system is in place throughout the state, officials would be able to determine which programs are turning out first-class teachers and which ones still need work. Just as important, local school districts would know which institution’s graduates to avoid and which ones to hire for which subjects.

This year’s report, released earlier this month, gives high marks to the teacher-preparation program at the University of Louisiana at Monroe. The report is especially flattering to The New Teacher Project. The private certification program, which works in other states as well, puts highly qualified college graduates through 12 to 18 months of additional training before placing them in schools.

According to the Louisiana report, new teachers from The New Teacher Project were more effective at teaching math, reading and language arts than others with two or more years of experience. A significant proportion of the project’s Louisiana teachers were sent by Teach for America, an increasingly popular nonprofit group that recruits high-achieving, young college graduates expressly for placement in schools that are difficult to staff.

The Louisiana findings echo a study earlier this year showing that Teach for America participants who worked in North Carolina between 2000 and 2006 had a more positive impact on student performance than traditional teachers. The difference was evident in several areas of science and was strongest in math.

It just seems to make sense me that we'd want to make sure our new teachers are as well trained as possible. Figuring out who is doing the best job, identifying their practices that make a difference and exporting those effective practices to other colleges is a logical improvement strategy. If alternative programs like The New Teacher Project and Teach for America are better preparing future teachers, colleges of education should be taking notice and working to find out what they're missing.

Unfortunately, if past behavior is any indicator, instead the deans of these colleges of education will come up with reasons why they can't change their curriculum or strategies or why the data showing better performance from alternative programs is flawed. Is it any wonder that education reforms are slow when we continue to train our teachers in less effective strategies?

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