techdirections February 2010 : Page 38

Teacher Preparation Reforming the Uncertain Profession By Arne Duncan I T’S an honor and pleasure to be here at Columbia Teachers College—the oldest, largest, and most storied graduate school of education in the United States. Here in this citadel of teacher prepa- ration, where giants like John Dewey played such a formative role, I’ve come to speak to you today about the need for a sea change in our schools of education. Many schools of education have provided high-quality preparation programs for aspiring teachers for years. In the last decade, a slew of education schools have also up- graded their programs or launched rigorous practice-based initiatives to adapt to the realities of preparing instructors to teach diverse students in the information age. Yet, many, if not most, of the nation’s 1,450 schools, colleges, and departments of education are doing a mediocre job of preparing teachers for the realities of the 21st century classroom. America’s university- based teacher preparation programs need revolutionary change—not evolutionary tinkering. Arne Duncan is the United States Secretary of Education. Condensed from a speech given at Columbia Teachers College, October 22, 2009. Reprinted from The Education Digest, January 2010. For more about The Education Digest or to subscribe, visit www.eddigest.com. 38 techdirections ◆ FEBRUARY 2010 America faces three great edu- cational challenges that make the need to improve teacher preparation programs all the more urgent. First, the education that millions of Ameri- cans got in the past simply won’t do anymore. In the information age, it is impossible to drop out of school and land a good job. Even workers with high school diplomas but without America’s university- based teacher preparation programs need revolutionary change—not evolutionary tinkering. college degrees are going to find they have limited opportunities in a com- petitive global economy. As Presi- dent Obama has said, “education is no longer just a pathway to opportu- nity and success—it’s a prerequisite to success.” Second, education, as Horace Mann said nearly two centuries ago, has long been the great equalizer in America. No matter what your race, national origin, disability, or zip code, every child is entitled to a qual- ity public education. Today, more than ever, we acknowledge America’s need—and a public school’s obliga- tion—to teach all students to their full potential. Nearly 30% of students drop out or fail to complete high school on time—that is 1.2 million kids a year. Barely 60% of African-American and Latino students graduate on time— and in many cities, half or more of low-income teens drop out of school. A Civil Rights Issue Education is the civil rights issue of our generation. And if you care about promoting opportunity and reducing inequality, about promot- ing civic knowledge and participa- tion, the classroom is the place to start. Children today in our neediest schools are more likely to have the least qualified teachers. That is why great teaching is about more than education—it is a daily fight for so- cial justice. The third force propelling the nation’s need for more and better teachers is the massive exodus of Baby Boomers from teaching in the next decade. We currently have about 3.2 mil- lion teachers who work in some 95,000 schools. But more than half of those teachers and principals are Baby Boomers. During the next four years we could lose a third of our veteran teachers and school leaders to retirement and attrition. By 2014, the U.S. Department of Education projects that up to one million new teaching positions will be filled by new teachers. These major demographic shifts mean that teaching is going to be a booming profession in the years

Teacher Preparation—Reforming the Uncertain Profession

IT’S an honor and pleasure to be here at Columbia Teachers College—the oldest, largest, and most storied graduate school of education in the United States. Here in this citadel of teacher preparation, where giants like John Dewey played such a formative role, I’ve come to speak to you today about the need for a sea change in our schools of education.

Many schools of education have provided high-quality preparation programs for aspiring teachers for years. In the last decade, a slew of education schools have also upgraded their programs or launched rigorous practice-based initiatives to adapt to the realities of preparing instructors to teach diverse students in the information age.

Yet, many, if not most, of the nation’s 1,450 schools, colleges, and departments of education are doing a mediocre job of preparing teachers for the realities of the 21st century classroom. America’s universitybased teacher preparation programs need revolutionary change—not evolutionary tinkering.

America faces three great educational challenges that make the need to improve teacher preparation programs all the more urgent. First, the education that millions of Americans got in the past simply won’t do anymore. In the information age, it is impossible to drop out of school and land a good job. Even workers with high school diplomas but without college degrees are going to find they have limited opportunities in a competitive global economy. As President Obama has said, “education is no longer just a pathway to opportunity and success—it’s a prerequisite to success.”

Second, education, as Horace Mann said nearly two centuries ago, has long been the great equalizer in America. No matter what your race, national origin, disability, or zip code, every child is entitled to a quality public education. Today, more than ever, we acknowledge America’s need—and a public school’s obligation— to teach all students to their full potential.

Nearly 30% of students drop out or fail to complete high school on time—that is 1.2 million kids a year. Barely 60% of African-American and Latino students graduate on time— and in many cities, half or more of low-income teens drop out of school.

A Civil Rights Issue

Education is the civil rights issue of our generation. And if you care about promoting opportunity and reducing inequality, about promoting civic knowledge and participation, the classroom is the place to start. Children today in our neediest schools are more likely to have the least qualified teachers. That is why great teaching is about more than education—it is a daily fight for social justice.

The third force propelling the nation’s need for more and better teachers is the massive exodus of Baby Boomers from teaching in the next decade.

We currently have about 3.2 million teachers who work in some 95,000 schools. But more than half of those teachers and principals are Baby Boomers. During the next four years we could lose a third of our veteran teachers and school leaders to retirement and attrition. By 2014, the U.S. Department of Education projects that up to one million new teaching positions will be filled by new teachers.

These major demographic shifts mean that teaching is going to be a booming profession in the years ahead—with school districts nationwide making up to 200,000 new, firsttime hires annually. Our ability to attract, and more importantly retain, great talent over the next five years will shape public education for the next 30 years—it is truly a once-ina- generation opportunity.

The challenge to our schools is not just a looming teacher shortage, but rather a shortage of great teachers in the schools and communities where they are needed most. As Lyndon Johnson foresaw in 1965, “tomorrow’s teachers must not merely be plentiful enough, they must be good enough. They must possess the old virtues of energy and dedication, but they must possess new knowledge and new skill.” In our new era of accountability, it is not enough for a teacher to say, “I taught it—but the students didn’t learn it.” As Linda Darling- Hammond has pointed out, that is akin to saying “the operation was a success but the patient died.”

High-poverty, high-needs schools still struggle to attract and retain good teachers. Teacher openings in science and math—subjects vitally important to the future—are often hard to fill with effective instructors. Students with disabilities and English language learners are still underserved. Rural classrooms are facing shortages and we have far too few teachers of color. Nationwide, more than 35% of public school students are Hispanic or black, but less than 15% of our teachers are black or Latino. It is especially troubling that less than 2% of our nation’s teachers are African American males.

To keep America competitive, and to make the American dream of equal educational opportunity a reality, we need to recruit, reward, train, learn from, and honor a new generation of talented teachers. But the bar must be raised for teacher preparation programs because we ask much more of teachers today than even a decade ago. Today, teachers are asked to achieve significant academic growth for all students at the same time that they instruct students with ever-more diverse needs. Teaching has never been more difficult, never more important, and the desperate need for more student success never been so urgent.

I urge every teacher education program today to make better outcomes for students the overarching mission that propels all their efforts. America’s great educational challenges require that this new generation of well-prepared teachers significantly boost student learning and increase college-readiness. President Obama has set an ambitious goal of having America regain its position as the nation with the highest proportion of college graduates in the world by 2020. But to reach that goal, both our K–12 system and our teacher preparation programs have to get dramatically better. The stakes are huge—and the time to cling to the status quo has passed.

There is a reason why so many of us remember a favorite teacher forever. A great teacher can change the course of a student’s life. They light a lifelong curiosity, a desire to participate in democracy, and a thirst for knowledge. Studies repeatedly document that the single biggest influence on student academic growth is the quality of the teacher—not socioeconomic status, not family background, but the quality of the teacher.

Earlier this month, I issued a call to teaching as an essential national mission of our time. But recruiting and preparing this army of great, new teachers depends heavily on our nation’s colleges of education.

More than half of tomorrow’s teachers will be trained at colleges of education. The U.S. Department of Education estimates that schools and departments of education produce about 220,000 certified teachers a year. I am all in favor of expanding high-quality alternative certificate routes, like High Tech High, the New Teacher Project, Teach for America, and teacher residency programs. But these promising alternatives produce fewer than 10,000 teachers per year.

The predominance of education schools in preparing teachers is not the only reason this is a national priority and a critical concern for higher education. America’s taxpayers already generously support teacher preparation programs. And it is only right that this investment should be well spent.

In the 2007-08 school year, nearly 30% of undergraduate education majors received Pell Grants totaling close to a billion dollars. That same year, about 40% of undergraduate education majors received $3 billion in federal loans. The federal government now provides about $4 billion a year in Pell Grants and Federal Loans to support students and our university-based teacher preparation programs.

At the same time, graduate schools of education have a huge impact on post-baccalaureate enrollment— they award nearly 30% of all master’s degrees, more than any other branch of graduate studies. And unlike independent alternative certification programs, universitybased teacher preparation programs have unique advantages—they are financially self-sustaining, have math and science departments on campus to assist in specialized training, can provide rich content knowledge in the liberal arts, and are in a position to research and test what works to improve student learning.

Troubled History

It is not possible to talk honestly about radical improvements to teacher preparation programs without acknowledging the troubled history of education schools and stubborn barriers to reform. To echo a sentiment voiced by deans of education schools, almost since colleges of education came into being they have frequently been treated like the Rodney Dangerfield of higher education. Education schools were the institution that got no respect—from the Oval Office to the Provost’s Office, from university presidents to Secretaries of Education.

From the onset of education schools a century ago, they have been beset by skeptics who believed that teachers are born, not made.

In Talks to Teachers on Psychology, published in 1899, William James warned that educators made “a very great mistake” in assuming that child psychology could help provide “methods of instruction for immediate school-room use.”

James thought that teaching was an instinctual art—and many of his colleagues agreed that teaching was more a craft than a profession. In The Uncertain Profession, former ed school administrator Arthur Powell argued that “none of the social sciences spawned by the American university at the end of the 19th century has had a more volatile and troublesome history than the field of education.”

The dismissal of teacher preparation programs by the liberal arts faculty on many campuses was so complete that in the 1930s the president of Harvard described Harvard’s Graduate School of Education as a “kitten that ought to be drowned.” Columbia was not exempt from soulsearching about the effectiveness of colleges of education. In 1944, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of Teachers College, Harvard president James Bryant Conant gave a speech here calling for a “Truce Among Educators”— a plea that fell on deaf ears. Nearly 20 years later, Conant authored a two-year study of education schools that acknowledged many students believed their required courses at ed school were “Mickey Mouse” courses.

Jacques Barzun, who wrote the best seller Teacher in America, was equally unsparing in his critique of education schools. In his essay “The Art of Making Teachers,” Barzun wrote that “teacher training is based on a strong anti-intellectual bias, enhanced by a total lack of imagination.” Jump forward to 1963 and you find President Kennedy voicing many of the same concerns about the quality of educational research that continue to resound today. “Research in education,”

Kennedy declared, “has been astonishingly meager and frequently ignored . . . It is appalling that so little is known about the level of performance, comparative value of alternative investments, and specialized problems of our educational system.”

Little Change

More than three decades later, not much—at least not enough—had changed. In 1995, the Holmes Group, a coalition of ed school deans, issued a report warning that “the education school should cease to act as a silent agent in the preservation of the status quo.” In 1999, Richard Riley, a predecessor as Secretary of Education, told the National Press Club that “we can no longer fiddle around the edges of how we recruit, prepare, retain, and reward America’s teachers.

. . . Our colleges of education can no longer be the sleepy backwaters.”

The most recent comprehensive study of education schools was carried out by Arthur Levine, the former president of Teachers College. Levine’s 2006 study found numerous examples of exemplary programs but also documented the persistence of problems that had afflicted ed schools for decades. “At the moment,” he wrote, “teacher education is the Dodge City of the education world. . . . Unruly and disordered. . . . The bottom line,” he concluded, “is that we lack empirical evidence of what works in preparing teachers for an outcome-based education system. We don’t know what, where, how, or when teacher education is most effective.”

Ed school deans and faculty interviewed for Levine’s study painted an unflattering picture of teacher education, which they complained was “subjective, obscure, faddish . . . Out of touch, politically correct . . . And failed to address the burning problems in the nation’s schools.” English professor E. D Hirsch, the father of the acclaimed, content-rich Core Knowledge Program, got his own taste of the ideological blinders at colleges of education when he taught an ed school course on the causes and cure of the achievement gap. Having authored the 1987 best seller Cultural Literacy, Hirsch anticipated that his course would be oversubscribed. But three years in a row, only 10 or so students enrolled.

Finally, one informed him that other professors in the ed school were encouraging students to shun the course because it ran counter to their pedagogical beliefs.

More than three out of five ed school alum surveyed for the Levine report said their training did not prepare them adequately for their work in the classroom. In my seven years as CEO of the Chicago Public Schools and in my current job, I’ve had hundreds of conversations with great young teachers. They echo many of the same concerns about ed schools. In particular, they say two things about their training. First, most say they did not get the handson practical teacher training about managing the classroom that they needed, especially for high-needs students. Second, they say they were not taught how to use data to differentiate and improve instruction and boost student learning.

The obvious question arises, why have teacher preparation programs historically been difficult to reform? And how is it that, in the face of this history, I am actually optimistic that important changes are already underway?

Let me start by answering the question about the obstacles to reform. It is far too simple to blame colleges of education for the slow pace of reform. In fact, universities, states, and the federal government have all impeded reform.

For decades, schools of education have been renowned for being cash cows for universities. The large enrollment in education schools and their relatively low overhead have made them profit-centers. But many universities have diverted those profits to more prestigious but underenrolled graduate departments like physics—while doing little to invest in rigorous educational research and well-run clinical training.

A Shortsighted Approach

This is shortsighted. If teaching is—and should be—one of our most revered professions, teacher preparation programs should be among a university’s most important responsibilities.

It takes a university to prepare a teacher. The arts and sciences faculty play an essential role in strengthening the content knowledge of aspiring teachers. I do not understand when college presidents and deans of the arts and science faculty ignore their teacher preparation programs—yet complain about the cost of providing remedial classes to freshmen. Simply put, incoming freshmen don’t know the content because too often they have been taught by teachers who don’t know the content well.

States, districts, and the federal government are also culpable for the persistence of weak teacher preparation. Most states routinely approve teacher education programs, and licensing exams typically measure basic skills and subject matter knowledge with paper-and-pencil tests without real-world assessment of classroom readiness. Local mentoring programs for new teachers are poorly funded and often poorly organized at the district level.

Less than a handful of states and districts carefully track the performance of teachers to their teacher preparation programs to identify which programs produce well-prepared teachers. We should study and copy the practices of effective teacher preparation programs— and encourage the lowestperformers to shape up or shut down.

Even the failure of some education schools to develop a rigorous, research-based curriculum cannot solely be laid at their door step. We all know that the reading and math wars have gone on for decades—but that doesn’t mean they are destined to last forever. Thanks to the national reading panel and other national expert assessments, educators know much more about the science of teaching reading and math today than a decade ago. Yet, countries like Singapore, South Korea, and the Czech Republic that outperform us in science and math provide teachers with much clearer guidance on key ideas and content to be mastered in each grade.

Each of these barriers to reform is beginning to slowly recede—and that is one reason why I remain optimistic that real improvements and change are underway.

Race to the Top

For the first time, 48 states have banded together to develop common college and career-ready standards for high school students—and the federal government is providing incentives through the Race to the Top Fund to encourage rigorous standards, including setting aside $350 million to fund the competitive development of better assessments for the standards. Just a year ago, many education experts doubted states would ever agree on common college-ready standards.

The draft Race to the Top criteria would also reward states that publicly report and link student achievement data to the programs where teachers and principals were credentialed. And the federal government is funding a large expansion of teacher residency programs in high-need districts and schools.

Teacher residency programs follow a medical model of training, with residents placed in schools with extensive induction and support during a year-long apprenticeship. The U.S. Department of Education recently announced $43 million in grants for 28 Teacher Quality Partnership programs that went to colleges of education and high-need school districts, with more than half of the five-year grants supporting residency programs. An additional $100 million in grants included in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act will be awarded early next year.

At the state and district level, states like Louisiana are leading the way in building the longitudinal data systems to track and compare the impact of new teachers on student achievement over a period of years. Louisiana’s system is already up and running, linking teacher education programs in the state back to student performance and growth in math, English, reading, science, and social studies.

All students in Louisiana in grades 4 through 9 who took one of the state assessments are eligible for inclusion in Louisiana’s evaluation of teacher impact—and the state uses three years of data involving hundreds of thousands of students and tens of thousands of teachers.

Louisiana is using that information to identify effective and ineffective programs—and university-based teacher education programs are using the outcomes data to revamp and strengthen their programs.

Right now, Louisiana is the only state that tracks the effectiveness of its teacher preparation programs.

Every state should be doing the same—and we are going to provide incentives in the $4.3 billion Race to the Top competition. It’s a simple but obvious idea—colleges of education and district officials ought to know which teacher preparation programs are effective and which need fixing. Transparency, longitudinal data, and competition can be powerful tonics for programs stuck in the past.

Just as states and districts are beginning to link teacher education programs to student outcomes, universities are also taking their responsibility to improve teacher preparation more seriously. I have been involved in a Listening and Learning tour during the last nine months that has taken me to more than 30 states. Everywhere I go, I see universities partnering with school districts; opening up lab schools, magnet schools, and charter schools; and creating professional development schools for ed school students to gain clinical experience. Universities have opened their doors to alternative certification programs— and are paying greater attention to the quality and supervision of student teachers during their clinical training.

As you know, the accreditation of schools of education is a voluntary process, and historically coursework had been given greater priority than clinical training. But there also are encouraging signs that colleges of education want to make self-policing more meaningful, with clinical experience driving coursework. Both the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) and the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education (AACTE) are firmly behind the new drive to link teacher preparation programs to better student outcomes.

In June, NCATE announced the first major revision of teacher education requirements in 10 years. It includes new accreditation requirements that will oblige institutions to strengthen the clinical focus of their programs and foster demonstrable increases in student learning.

NCATE’s new accreditation system will be modeled in part on Tennessee’s evolving experiment, where the Board of Regents has decided that all undergraduate teacher candidates will spend their senior year in yearlong residencies in P–12 schools. I hope other states and schools of education shift more to the residency-model of training.

The AACTE and its 800 colleges and universities have made it a core mission to have pre-service education lead to substantial increases in student achievement. One of AACTE’s most promising new initiatives is the development of the first nationally accessible assessment of teacher candidate readiness. Under this performancebased assessment, supervising teachers and faculty would evaluate student teachers in the classroom. And student teachers and interns would be required to plan and teach a week-long stint of instruction mapped to state standards and provide commentaries on videotapes of their instruction and classroom management. Already 14 states have signed up to pilot the performance assessment.

In the end, I don’t think the ingredients of good teacher preparation are much of a mystery anymore. Our best programs are coherent, up-to-date, research-based, and provide students with subject mastery.

They have a strong and substantial field-based program in local public schools that drives much of the course work in classroom management and student learning and prepares students to teach diverse pupils in high-needs settings. These programs have a shared vision of what constitutes good teaching and best practices—including a singleminded focus on improving student learning and using data to inform instruction.

Courage and Commitment

With courage and commitment, our teacher preparation programs can provide dynamic and effective teacher preparation for the 21st century. In place of the uncertain profession, I want to see teacher preparation programs one day rival those of other professions.

When the Elementary and Secondary Education Act is reauthorized, we will be reinvesting in teacher education programs. We will encourage partnerships with states and districts that address teacher shortages in highneeds areas. And we will encourage programs committed to results: Programs that use data, including student achievement data, to foster an ethic of continuous improvement for students and teachers.

It’s often said that great teachers are unsung heroes, but for me that truism has real meaning. Teaching is one of the few professions that is not just a job or even an adventure—it’s a calling. Great teachers strive to help every student unlock their potential and develop the habits of mind that will serve them for a lifetime. They believe that every student has a gift—even when students doubt themselves. Henry Adams said that “a teacher affects eternity—he can never tell where his influence stops.” That is a weighty responsibility and a unique privilege.

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