education sector policy briefs A Measured Approach to Improving Teacher Preparation By Chad Aldeman, Kevin Carey, Erin Dillon, Ben Miller, and Elena Silva www.educationsector.org ABOUT THE AUTHORS CHAD ALDEMAN is a policy analyst at Education Sector. He can be reached at [email protected]. KEVIN CAREY is the policy director at Education Sector. He can be reached at [email protected]. ERIN DILLON is a senior policy analyst at Education Sector. She can be reached at [email protected]. BEN MILLER is a policy analyst at Education Sector. He can be reached at [email protected]. ELENA SILVA is a senior policy analyst at Education Sector. She can be reached at [email protected]. ABOUT EDUCATION SECTOR Education Sector is an independent think tank that challenges conventional thinking in education policy. We are a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization committed to achieving measurable impact in education, both by improving existing reform initiatives and by developing new, innovative solutions to our nation’s most pressing education problems. © Copyright 2011 Education Sector Education Sector encourages the free use, reproduction, and distribution of our ideas, perspectives, and analyses. Our Creative Commons licens- ing allows for the noncommercial use of all Education Sector authored or commissioned materials. We require attribution for all use. For more information and instructions on the com mercial use of our materials, please visit our website, www.educationsector.org. 1201 Connecticut Ave., N.W., Suite 850, Washington, D.C. 20036 202.552.2840 • www.educationsector.org Every year for the last six years, the state of Kentucky has identified the teacher preparation programs at Union College, a small private institution in Appalachia, as “at-risk” or “low-performing.” Yet Union still grants education degrees each year, sending nearly 300 graduates 1 into Kentucky schools, all with the full backing of the state. Kentucky is not the only state to let low-performing and state levels. The focus is on moving beyond just teacher preparation programs stay in business. In inputs, or counting program graduates and placement fact, it does better than most, simply because it rates, to measuring outcomes, or how well graduates bothers to identify the low performers at all. Although are performing in the classroom.4 In a 2009 speech at all states are required to identify substandard teacher the University of Virginia, U.S. Secretary of Education preparation programs, over half of all states have Arne Duncan lamented the fact that teacher education never identified a single program. The few programs programs often “act as the Bermuda Triangle of higher that are named face few consequences, even if, like education—students sail in, but no one knows what Union College, they are continually called out. At the happens to them after they come out.”5 same time, good programs, those that consistently do the best job of preparing teachers to help students Similarly, the National Council for Accreditation of learn, receive little recognition or reward. The result Teacher Education recently issued a report arguing for is a teacher education system—supported by an more rigorous accountability of teacher preparation ever-expanding set of federal financial aid programs programs, writing, “All teacher education programs and multimillion-dollar federal grants—that offers should be accountable for—and their accreditation few signals or guarantees of quality for anyone contingent upon—how well they address the needs 6 involved, from the college students who often borrow of schools and help improve P-12 student learning.” thousands of dollars to attend the programs to the NCATE (now merged with a rival accrediting agency, districts, schools, and children that depend on good TEAC, to create the Council for the Accreditation teachers. of Educator Preparation) has pledged to develop stronger standards and close programs that don’t The problem is immense. The nation will need more meet those standards. Finally, a handful of states than a million new teachers in the next five years have launched initiatives to track the student learning and will rely almost exclusively on the existing outcomes of program graduates, and 31 states 1,434 colleges that are approved by states to train included plans to track such outcomes in their elementary and secondary teachers.2 These new applications for federal Race to the Top funding. teachers will have enormous influence on their students’ success. Research proves the critical effect But these efforts alone will not suffice. Strong federal of individual teachers on student learning.3 As such, action is needed to accelerate and scale these policymakers and major philanthropies are moving reforms. In 1998 Congress amended the federal on a variety of fronts to improve the effectiveness Higher Education Act to require states to hold teacher of teachers once they are in the classroom, from preparation programs accountable by publicly strengthening evaluation systems to proposing new identifying (and then improving) low-performers. compensation schemes. But without ensuring the When the law was reauthorized in 2008, Congress best possible preparation for beginning teachers, went a step further, requiring institutions to provide these efforts are likely to fall short. “assurances” to the secretary of education that their teacher preparation programs meet the recruitment Fortunately, the need to reform teacher education needs of local districts and the instructional demands is gaining attention and momentum on both federal of new teachers.7 And yet, struggling institutions www.educationsector.org • January 2011 EDUCATION SECTOR POLICY BRIEFS: A Measured Approach to Improving Teacher Preparation 1 like Union College continue on without signs of in schools of education, but a substantial number improvement, and thousands of ill-prepared new of “alternative route” programs, where teachers can teachers enter classrooms every year. bypass university-based pre-service preparation, have emerged in recent years. When Congress reauthorizes the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, followed soon after by a All these choices might seem like a good way to new Higher Education Act, it will have an opportunity meet the diverse education needs of our nation. to do better. Past experience proves that relying After all, these programs combined produce plenty solely on states to set and enforce high standards for of teachers—nearly 300,000 each year—to meet the teacher preparation will not work. Thus, a new federal overall demand.8 They don’t, however, produce the approach is needed. This would include: right kind of teachers in the right places. 1. A new federal framework for assessing and Programs pay almost no attention to the labor needs improving teacher preparation programs, one that of states or local districts, much less the nation. encourages accurate and honest reporting on As a result, teacher education produces a glut of outcomes-based indicators of quality. elementary teachers; too few subject experts in science, math, and special education; and insufficient 2. A new set of competitive grants that will encourage numbers willing and able to teach in high-need states and institutions to make ambitious changes communities.9 And at a time when minority students to how, and how rigorously, they monitor, evaluate, are growing fast in number and are soon to be the and improve their teacher preparation programs. majority, graduates of teacher education programs The grants should focus on both systemic are still disproportionately female and white. Research improvement for all programs and immediate action has found no conclusive link between the race of a for programs that consistently fail. teacher and the performance of students, but the 3. A new strategy to streamline existing financial aid absence of male minority teachers is staggering. As programs and better align those programs with the achievement of black male students dips to a current efforts to improve the quality of the teacher crisis point, with dropout rates now double that of work force. This should involve eliminating TEACH their white peers, less than 2 percent of the nation’s 10 Grants, an ineffective pre-service grant program, teachers are African-American men. And since and using those resources to expand debt most programs accept nearly all applicants, new forgiveness benefits for high-quality classroom teachers are also unlikely to be among top performers teachers. academically. According to a recent analysis of beginning teachers, only 14 percent teaching in high- Combined, these strategies will create the right poverty schools come from the top third of college conditions for states and institutions to reform graduates.11 poor-performing teacher preparation programs, improve preparation as a whole, and help keep more Teacher education programs, then, are good at well-prepared teachers in the classroom after they churning out teachers, but far less successful at graduate. ensuring that those teachers are effectively meeting the needs of public schools and students. The two existing mechanisms for holding programs The Current State of Teacher accountable, state approval and voluntary accreditation, have done little to solve this problem. Education State departments of education set requirements that teacher preparation programs must meet for With more than 1,400 institutions in the United States their graduates to be eligible