I like James Durbin’s commentary on a life’s many turns. “It is what it is. It is what you make it.” Durbin is a singer-song writer living and succeeding with Tourette syndrome.
A bad public image is what it is. Bad is not good! However, it also can be what you make it. Once we accept that “what is” must be changed, the only real question is “What are we prepared to do to improve the public image of teaching?” The crux of the matter goes beyond problem recognition which has been pointed out over time. The crux of the matter is creating a resolve to overcome the dead weight of historic inertia and cause necessary changes that will result in a vibrant and sustainable new image for the professional teacher.
Several dozen re-readings of the following Education Week article excerpt and the National Online Survey of College Students findings only reconfirms that the analysts got it right. As a profession, teaching suffers from bad public imaging and, sadly, has not found ways to correct its lack of professional status or prevent its continuing self-denigration as a profession. I emphasize self-denigration.
“The teaching profession has a major image problem,” Third Way analysts Tamara Hiler and Lanae Erickson Hatalsky write in their analysis of the National Online Survey of College Students – Education Attitudes. “Unfortunately, this perception of mediocrity has negatively affected the national reputation of teaching, initiating a cycle of undesirable outcomes that can be felt throughout the profession.”
In the past week, the Vergara v. California decision from the Superior Court of the State of California could only reinforce a public opinion that teachers are a labor union and not a profession. The immediate “professional” response to the court’s decision by our two national organizations, the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association, defended the very problem that the court pointed to – the right of tenured teachers to job security despite the quality of their teaching. The response was to protect the jobs of teachers of lesser quality over the employment of teachers of higher quality. Our professional unions showed what they are – unions that protect the employment of teachers and not professional organizations that improve teaching. Ouch!
http://studentsmatter.org/our-case/vergara-v-california-case-summary/
A headline related to Vergara read “American Federation Of Teachers Vows To Force Crappy Teachers On Poor Kids”. A quick read of the article indicates an anti-teacher bias in the reporting, but most readers don’t read to understand journalistic point of view. The headline in bold type caught the reader’s attention and reinforced a pre-existing opinion.
A week later another report put a second dope slap on the teaching profession. The National Council on Teacher Quality issued its “2014 Teacher Prep Review.” The Daily Caller reported it this way.
“The group’s 2014 Teacher Prep Review ranked the nation’s hundreds of teacher certification programs by factoring their admissions standards, academic rigor, syllabuses, and other factors, rating them from Level I to Level IV. Those ranked Level IV were considered top-ranked, while those at Level I were decidedly subpar or even failing.
At the elementary level, out of 788 evaluated programs, just 26 managed to hit Level IV, while a whopping 529 were stuck at Level I. Secondary programs fare somewhat better; out of 824 programs, 81 were Level IV and 319 were at Level I. Seventeen states and the District of Columbia have no Level IV programs at all.
A major reason for the low scores, the group said, is that schools continue to fail at training prospective teachers in scientific approaches to student learning, and fail to ensure teachers have mastered all of the content they will teach. While the vast majority of programs do ensure teachers have studied reading and composition, about half of all programs evaluated don’t have sufficient requirements in place to make sure teachers have mastered elementary math and science to the levels expected of teachers in nations with high-performing schools.
About three quarters of programs don’t even meet the ‘modest academic standard’ of requiring admitted students to be in the top half of their college class, the report said. A scant 5 percent have all the components the group views as useful for a strong educational training program.”
So, what would James Durbin mean when he said, “Life is what you make it”?
The NCTQ laid out a set of recommendations. When taken at face value, each or all of these begins to make a difference by addressing a component of teaching that contributes to its bad public image. The findings go one step further and cite places where these recommendations are being enacted and are making a difference in teaching and learning.
http://www.nctq.org/teacherPrep/review2014/findings/nationalPolicies.jsp
• Make it tougher to get into a teacher preparation program. Some institutions set lower admission standards for entry into teaching than they do for their athletes to qualify for competition. Institutions need to admit only college students who are in the top half of their class.
Where it’s being done: In Delaware, teacher candidates must have a minimum GPA of 3.0 or a GPA in the top half of their college-attending class. Delaware also requires teacher candidates to pass a test “normed to the general college-bound population.” Rhode Island also requires an average cohort GPA of 3.0, and beginning in 2016, the cohort mean score on nationally-normed tests such as the ACT, SAT or GRE must be in the top 50th percentile. In 2020, the requirement for the mean test score will increase from the top half to the top third.
• Make it tougher to be recommended for licensure. States need to choose the right licensing tests — tests that will assess each and every subject a teacher could be assigned to teach — and make sure that the cut-scores are set high enough to ensure that new teachers really know their stuff.
Where it’s being done: Massachusetts sets high expectations for what elementary teachers need to know across the board and uses top-notch tests for reading instruction and elementary mathematics. Only Tennessee, Indiana, and Missouri ensure that their secondary teachers have thorough knowledge of each subject they may teach, eliminating any loopholes.
• Hold programs accountable for the effectiveness of their graduates by using data on novice teacher effectiveness.
Where it’s being done: Florida, Louisiana, North Carolina, Ohio and Tennessee have taken the lead in employing value-added analysis of student test scores to identify programs producing the most effective graduates. Louisiana is the only state to take a first step in using this data for program accountability, for a time prohibiting its lowest performing institution from accepting new students. A more promising alternative to value-added will be the use of aggregated results from the next generation of teacher evaluation instruments (which include measures of student growth), capable of yielding data on more teachers and more programs.
• Make program approval — and re-approval — contingent on passing rigorous on-site inspections.
Where it’s being done: Almost all states either conduct site visits of teacher preparation programs themselves or outsource site visits to accreditors, but these visits have not proven to be of much value. States should take a page from the experience of the United Kingdom, which has used professional inspectors in concert with other policy measures to drive up substantially the quality of its teacher preparation programs. Based on the UK model, NCTQ has served as an incubator for an inspectorate that is now run independently by TPI-US in partnership with the UK Tribal Group that deploys professionally trained and managed inspectors drawn from the ranks of PK-12 principals and teachers who carefully scrutinize all aspects of teacher preparation programs including program coursework and candidate teaching. Programs in Texas and New Mexico have participated in pilot inspections.
• Make the student teaching requirement meaningful. States should only allow student teachers to be placed with classroom teachers who have been found effective. Furthermore, districts could limit the number of student teachers they accept to correspond with their own capacity and needs.
Where it’s being done: Florida, Rhode Island and Tennessee require that only teachers who have demonstrated evidence of effectiveness as measured by student learning can qualify as cooperating teachers. However, no district we know of currently places limits on the number of teachers it accepts, and districts are clearly devoting precious resources to the training of teachers whom they will never hire. In the Chicago area, for example, teacher prep programs are producing three times as many elementary student teachers as there are effective and available cooperating teachers in the Chicago school district.
• Base state funding on the quality of teacher preparation provided by institutions.
Where it’s being done: Nine states — Illinois, Indiana, Louisiana, Michigan, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Tennessee and Washington — base at least some funding to public IHEs on meeting key goals (e.g., on-time graduation) as opposed to enrollment; Tennessee bases 100 percent of its higher education funding on this model. Another five states — Arkansas, Colorado, Missouri, South Dakota and Virginia — are transitioning to such a system. While none of these states specifically addresses teacher preparation, there is no reason that they could not do so.
• Set a fixed limit on the number of licenses in each teaching area that will be issued each year.
Where it’s being done: Despite the fact that teacher preparation programs collectively produce more than twice as many new teachers as are hired, no state has attempted to cap licenses. The United Kingdom, however, estimates how many teachers are needed and allocates enrollment slots to programs based on their quality. Combined with inspection, this has significantly reduced production at low quality preparation programs. Ontario, Canada recently halved the number of enrollment slots it allocates to teacher colleges to address significant oversupply of new teachers.
• Lower tuition for high need areas such as special education and STEM preparation programs.
Where it’s being done: Florida is considering lowering tuition for academic majors that are in short supply (e.g., engineering and physics). With college costs imposing an increasingly heavy burden, this tool has real promise to encourage aspiring teachers to go into the areas where school districts face significant shortages.
• Enforce existing teacher prep standards through the program approval process. Every teacher preparation program has to win and maintain state approval in order to be in business. States should use this process to ensure that programs meet existing standards.
Where it’s being done: Michigan ordered Lake Superior State University and Olivet College to stop enrolling candidates in most of their secondary programs because of low licensure test pass rates. Afterward, the president of Western Michigan University, whose programs were deemed “at-risk,” promptly announced that he would work to make his school of education to be among the best in the state in three years.
Several of these recommendations may be tough to implement. However, when taken as a whole, they make sense. Additionally, tough changes are in order when the purpose is to correct a degenerative problem. A good way to conceptualize recommendations such as these is to chunk them – chain them together so that together the chained effect creates the greatest improvement
First, more rigorous admission requirements to teacher preparation programs links with demonstrated subject-area mastery and this links with capping the number of teacher licenses issued annually. For too long, a teacher prep program was the default for collegian who wanted to major in a subject area, like history or literature or political science or science, but could not foresee a post-graduate opportunities. Their answer to a parent’s inquiry of “What will you do with a major in anthropology?” was to convert their study into a social studies teaching certification. Also, there were too many jocks who did not move beyond college athletics yet wanted to remain in athletics. Teaching so that they could coach became their fall-back employment. Making admission to a teacher prep program more rigorous assures that those who are admitted have the right academic credentials and a more potent academic record.
In the past, school districts did the sorting of all teacher candidates. Hundreds of candidates applied for a dozen jobs and included in the hundreds were very highly qualified and very poorly qualified teachers. Local administrators tried their best to identify and recruit what they thought were the best. There is very good reason for teacher preparation programs to limit their admissions and for teacher licensing authorities to cap the annual number of licenses granted. Tightening the so-called spigot of teachers into the educational job market can assure that only the best candidates for teacher preparation are prepared and only the best of those become licensed. Matching the number of licenses issued annually to recent projections of employment needs then allows schools to access a well-trained candidate pool of future teachers.
A second chunk of recommendations that makes sense is chaining together the accreditation of teacher preparation programs and the creditability of student teacher or practicum experiences within teacher prep programs. The proliferation of teacher prep programs, especially by online and for-profit institutions stretches the imagination when considering the rigorous support of teacher preparation. Access and accountability are two entirely separate values for aspiring teachers. Candidates want the first; the profession must demand the second. Coupled with strict inspection of preparation programs must be even stricter approval and support of teacher practicum experiences. Practicum students should be matched only with the best of instructional practitioners for an excessively clinical practicum. The clinical element is essential for aspirants to truly hone their instructional repertoire not just be allowed to “try things out.”
Concomitant to these two recommendations is the valid inspection and certification of programs. Over the past three decades, internal supervision of program vitality and direction has become the norm and fewer states and school districts have used the services of external, expert certification. As a sad result, programs teacher preparation programs have acquiesced to budget reductions (no external inspection costs) and non-critical analysis of program integrity. A return to external, expert certification based upon performance and data is necessary to rebuild both professional and public confidence in teacher preparation.
Almost every problem related to current and future conditions in our world includes, in a discussion of what be done, a process of education. Education is vital to every aspect of future life. If teachers are to play a role in this essential work, the public confidence in teachers must be changed. It is time to get a grip on the problem that many people hold the teaching profession in low esteem. We must repair what is wrong, commit with integrity to significant institutional changes, and teach the public once again the importance of the teaching profession.