Teacher education

America’s economic future depends on the success of our public schools, and the success of our schools depends upon effective teachers and principals.

In the next Congress, both the Elementary and Secondary Education Act and the Higher Education Act will be up for reauthorization. We need to seize this opportunity to improve the chances for student success by building a truly collaborative system for educator preparation -- one that creates a positive school environment, allows educators to work together and connects higher education to early childhood and K-12 education.

Currently, these systems function in their own separate silos of educational policy and practice. While some innovative practices are being implemented in each arena, there is no systematic connection.  Educational stakeholders -- parents, teachers, principals, superintendents and policy makers -- need to engage now on how best to establish an aligned system, especially for the preparation of new educators who will be teaching and leading in schools with the greatest needs.

Our legislation, the Educator Preparation Reform Act, increases collaboration between high-need local educational agencies, clinical teacher preparation sites, and community stakeholder organizations, and, secondly, streamlines and strengthens the accountability for teacher preparation programs. In developing this legislation, we have had input from a broad coalition of stakeholders representing teachers, colleges and universities, principals, school boards, and community-based organizations. Moving forward, we will continue to seek input from the community and from our colleagues to strengthen the proposal and to ultimately enact legislation that will chart a clear path forward for preparing educators for success in our schools and classrooms.

The Educator Preparation Reform Act  builds on the success of the Teacher Quality Partnership Program, which connects institutions of higher education with high-needs school districts and other partners to reform teacher education and help teacher preparation programs and public schools collectively and collaboratively share new ideas and best practices.

One of the toughest challenges facing high-need schools is retaining effective teachers and principals. According to the National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future, almost half of teachers leave their job within five years -- creating a churn that correlates to poorer outcomes for students. One way to combat this high turnover rate is to improve educator preparation. According to a study by the National Center for Education Statistics, teachers with greater levels of preparation are more likely to remain in their jobs than those that did not go through a teacher preparation program.

The Educator Preparation Reform Act will help local schools and community organizations and institutions of higher learning partner together to provide yearlong teacher and principal residency programs -- pairing a high-need school district with an educator preparation program -- to ensure that new, well-qualified teachers and principals are ready to serve in high-need school districts. 

The Educator Preparation Reform Act overhauls the cumbersome and opaque reporting requirements for teacher preparation programs with a focus on transparency and data that can inform program improvement.  Under this bill, teacher preparation programs would report on key quality measures that address both program inputs and outcomes, such as grade point averages and test scores for teacher candidates admitted to the program, data on clinical preparation requirements, and program graduate’s impact on student learning, performance in the classroom, and retention in the field of teaching.

All programs -- whether traditional or alternative routes to certification -- must be accountable and report on the same measures.

We require states to identify at-risk and low performing programs and provide them with technical assistance and a timeline for improvement. States would be asked to close programs that do not improve.

The Educator Preparation Reform Act would also support assessments to measure teacher readiness for the classroom. States and teacher preparation programs that implement these teacher performance assessments would be able to report on the outcomes on these assessments rather than on the current teacher licensing exams.

Finally, the Educator Preparation Reform Act makes important changes to the TEACH Grant program to focus on students who have committed to pursuing teaching in programs that meet the quality standards for performance set by their state. Eligibility for grants would be restricted to the final two years of a teacher preparation program. In this way, we will reduce the number of TEACH Grant recipients who are required to pay back their grants as loans because after a few semesters they decide that teaching is not for them. Institutions that are identified as low-performing in their state will not be eligible to offer new TEACH Grants to their students. 

Our focus on the educator is essential, now more than ever before. 

Every day, in schools and classrooms across the country, hardworking teachers, principals, and support staff work to spark innovation and prepare our students to meet the challenges of tomorrow.

We can help them today, by passing the Educator Preparation Reform Act and ensuring that educators in the classroom are well-prepared to enter the profession and the best and brightest are ready to serve where they are needed the most.

Teacher education has been under siege in the last few years, the first line of attack in the growing criticism and more aggressive regulation of higher education.

Most recently, the U.S. Department of Education proposed — in a highly contentious negotiated rule-making exercise — to use test scores of graduates’ students to evaluate schools of education, despite the warnings of leading researchers that such scores are unstable and invalid for this purpose. Furthermore, in an unprecedented move, the department would  limit eligibility for federal TEACH grants to prospective teachers from highly rated programs, denying aid to many deserving candidates while penalizing programs that prepare teachers for the most challenging teaching assignments.

This was only the most recent example of how education reformers have made teachers and teacher education a punching bag, painting those in the entire field as having low standards and being unwilling to accept responsibility for the quality of their work.

However, teacher educators from across the country are stepping up to create new, more valid accountability tools. An important part of this effort is the spread of the edTPA, a new performance assessment process that examines — through candidates’ plans, videotapes of instruction, evidence of student work and learning, and commentary — whether prospective teachers are really ready to teach. As highlighted recently in The New York Times, the assessment focuses on whether teachers can organize instruction to promote learning for all students, including new English learners and students with disabilities, and how they analyze learning outcomes to create greater student success.

This new assessment was developed by a team of researchers and teacher educators at Stanford University, of which I have been privileged to be a part, working with teachers and teacher educators across the country. The American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education (AACTE) helped to coordinate higher education involvement. Ultimately, teacher educators and state agencies in 24 states and the District of Columbia formed a Teacher Performance Assessment Consortium (TPAC) to develop and test the assessment. Today, about 160 colleges of education are field-testing the assessment, with the goal of transforming initial licensure, improving teacher education, and informing accreditation.

This may be the first time that the teacher education community has come together to hold itself accountable for the quality of teachers who are being prepared and to develop tools its members believe are truly valid measures of teaching knowledge and skill. Unlike other professionals, teachers have historically had little control over the tests by which they are evaluated. This rigorous, authentic measure represents a healthy and responsible professionalization of teacher preparation.

The edTPA is built on the portfolio-based model teachers developed two decades ago through the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, and on additional work by California educators since 2002, coordinated by staff at Stanford. Teacher educators from more than 30 traditional and alternative programs helped develop the Performance Assessment for California Teachers (PACT) as the basis for an initial license. The PACT is scored in a consistent fashion by faculty members, instructors, supervisors, cooperating teachers, and principals in partnership schools. It provides vivid evidence of what beginning teachers can do, as well as useful information for guiding their learning and that of the programs themselves.

The assessment puts aside the tired arguments about which pathways to teaching are better and, instead, evaluates candidates on whether they can meet a common standard of effective practice. Unlike most current teacher tests, scores on PACT have proven to predict the capacity of candidates to foster student achievement as beginning teachers.

California programs have found the assessment so helpful in guiding and improving their practice — and that of their candidates — that they have continued the work on their own dime, even when promised state funds disappeared. One California teacher educator put it this way: "This experience has forced me to revisit the question of what really matters in the assessment of teachers, which in turn means revisiting the question of what really matters in the preparation of teachers."

As a teacher educator in California who uses the PACT, I agree with this evaluation. It has focused our candidates and program on what it means to teach effectively and it has improved our collective work. We now rely on it as a central part of our ongoing program improvement efforts.

A national version of the assessment process was started as interest spread across the country. First, a teacher educator from the University of California at Santa Barbara moved to the University of Washington and took the PACT with him. Faculty at the University of Washington liked the assessment so much they adopted it and talked about it to others in the state, who also got engaged. Ultimately, the state of Washington proposed building a similar model to use for beginning licensure. California educators also got jobs in other states and took the idea with them. Teacher educators from other states asked to be part of the project and urged the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education as well as their own state agencies to look at edTPA because they believe it measures their work more accurately than many other approaches currently on the books.

Meanwhile, AACTE coordinated information sessions and conversations. Ultimately, a group of teacher educators from across the country decided to create a national version, recruited Pearson as an operational partner to manage the large number of participants, and when it came time to field test the assessment, the interest grew to 22 states, 160 institutions of higher education, and more than 7,000 teaching candidates participating in the TPA field test

Demand for edTPA grew so rapidly that support was needed to deliver it to campuses and states that asked for it. Stanford chose Evaluation Systems, a long-time developer of state teacher assessments that is now part of Pearson, to provide support for administering the assessment. As the administrative partner for the National Board’s portfolio assessment as well, Pearson brought the experience, capacity, and infrastructure to deploy the edTPA to scale quickly, so that the field would not have to wait to see the benefits in the classroom.

During the field test, an instructor at a Massachusetts college made national news when she challenged the assessment as corporatization of the teacher education process that replaces the relationship between instructor and students. Nothing could be further from the truth. Instructors and supervisors continue to teach, observe, support, and evaluate candidates, as they always have. The assessment – which allows teachers to be evaluated authentically in their own student teaching or internship classrooms teaching curriculums and lessons they have designed – focuses attention on the kinds of things all beginning teachers need to learn: how to plan around learning goals and student needs, how to engage in purposeful instruction and reflect on the results; how to evaluate student learning and plan for next steps for individual students and the class as a whole.

Like assessments in other professions, such as the bar exam or the medical boards, the edTPA is a peer-developed process that evaluates how well candidates have mastered a body of knowledge and skills, and a tool that teacher educators and institutions of higher learning can use to develop their programs. It does not restrict or replace the judgment of professionals in designing their courses and supervising their candidates, as they always have. It adds information about the candidate's performance to supplement those judgments. The edTPA scorers are themselves experienced teacher educators and accomplished teachers in the same fields as the candidates being evaluated, many of them from the programs participating in the assessment.

In fact, the field test has engendered considerable excitement at most universities, where conversations about how to prepare teachers have deepened. Amee Adkins, a teacher educator at Illinois State University, says, "[edTPA] provides something long overdue in teacher education: a clear, concise, and precise definition of the core of effective beginning teaching. It takes us a step further than other professional licensure exams because it goes beyond knowledge and judgment and examines actual candidate performance."

Vanderbilt University’s Marcy Singer-Gabella notes that faculty at the eight Tennessee universities piloting the assessment say that working with edTPA has led to more productive conversations about teaching practices and how to develop them. She adds: "At Vanderbilt, where we have used [edTPA] data to make changes, our candidates are better prepared and more skilled, according to school principals and teachers."

And the candidates themselves report that the TPA has helped them develop the habits and routines for planning, assessing, and adjusting instruction that allow them to succeed and keep learning as they teach. By comparison, as one put it, the teacher evaluation systems in their districts are “a piece of cake.”

In the context of the current debates about teacher education quality, it has been inspiring to see educators step up and accept the challenge to create something better, rather than merely complaining about narrow measures that do not reflect our highest aspirations. The best hope for significantly improving education at all levels of the system is for educators to take charge of accountability and make it useful for learning and improvement.

Newspapers across the country paid significant significant attention last week to the publication of "Educating School Leaders," a report by Arthur Levine, president of Columbia University’s Teachers College. We at the Renaissance Group, a consortium of 36 universities that prepare 1 of every 10 new teachers for the nation’s classrooms and a significant number of principals and school system administrators, take very seriously the business of preparing school personnel.

And we take umbrage at yet another study that paints all colleges of education with the same broad brush stroke on how ineffective we are -- when, in fact, our accrediting agencies and clientele report how well we are doing our jobs and are impressed with the quality of graduates from our member institutions.

We agree with Levine that some school leadership preparation programs lackquality in preparing their students, and for the Renaissance Group’s 16 years of existence we have strived to engage in public debate to help improve these programs. But we feel it is wrong and dangerous to make the kind of sweeping generalizations that Levine does. Among our concerns with his work: 

1) Levine’s study did in-depth interviews on only a few campuses with educational leadership programs. Using this small sample to represent the numerous educator preparation programs in the U.S. is misleading. The ultimate question that should be investigated and answered is whether or not those who are being prepared as building and district leaders have the knowledge, skills, and dispositions to promote vision, create positive learning outcomes for children, and be successful in today's ever changing schools. Policy makers and politicians must accept the fact that not all individuals have what it takes to be an effective leader. Likewise, it is true that some institutions and programs are going to have to get serious about quality issues instead of focusing on quantity. If institutions are not willing to make these tough decisions, states will need to intervene. 

2) We feel Levine's paper makes many unsubstantiated claims about educational leadership programs, which we don’t want to repeat here to lend them credence. No data is provided to support the negative statements in the paper.

3) Levine’s recommendation that a new degree be created, a master’s in educational administration, with a curriculum in both management and education, approaches the issue from a one-size-fits-all model. This is an old solution to a new set of issues and challenges. It fails to acknowledge that not all programs are alike and that institutions are right now redesigning their educational leadership programs to align them with the work of the public schools the colleges of education have relationships with, as well as with acknowledged standards of student learning and of preparation for school employees.

Numerous Renaissance Group institutions are not only using new and effective leadership preparation models but faculty are actively and directly working with employees in the schools. Faculty members at various schools of education are currently working with local education agencies on principal mentoring programs, an elementary school district on improving student achievements, and with administrators outside the United States on programs to improve their schools. Faculty routinely conduct reorganization studies and curriculum audits for school districts, and work with state boards of education.
    
The Renaissance Group would agree that certain school preparation programs need either a significant overhaul or to be closed. It is time both to start identifying those programs and institutions and to give more credit to those institutions that are effectively preparing school leaders. Let’s not throw the baby out with the bath water. The Renaissance Group’s vision is that its member institutions will be exemplars for P-16 collaboration, noted for their impact on student learning and leadership in professional education for America’s schools.

Colleges and universities have come under relentless pressure from lawmakers and the public about retention and graduation issues, and demands for accountability based on graduation rates have increased across the country. Higher education even faces the possibility of standardized achievement testing, which has made life at the K-12 level miserable for teachers without necessarily improving student learning. Unless colleges and universities can start to both raise graduation and retention rates, and to change the public’s perspective on these issues, academe may look a lot more like a high school than a university.

Universities and colleges, including my own, have made retention a priority, encouraging faculty members to rethink what they do in order to foster student success. However, this is only half the effort needed, and may come too late for many students. Like the musical Chicago’s Velma Kelly, colleges and universities cannot be a one-person act in the musical Retention; they need their K-12 partners to get in on the action.

Recent research on student achievement may help colleges and universities start to formulate policies that reverse this tide of bad news. The first key piece of evidence comes from Clifford Adelman’s study “The Toolbox Revisited," which charted the high school courses that helped students complete college on time. He found that taking a core set of academic classes was the most powerful predictor of high school and college success, for students of all races, classes and genders.

In other words, a great deal of the success of college students depends on the choices they made in high school, particularly the decision to take rigorous classes, and to also pursue college credit options. If students enter college with six college credits in academic subjects, their chance of successfully making it through freshman year increases markedly. Core high school academic classes, such as advanced mathematics, give students a broader chance of majors, and keep them out of the remedial/non-credit classes that serve as a trap for students, basically leading to stagnation and eventual non-completion.

A second recent piece of evidence is William Tierney, Zoe B. Corwin, and Julia E. Colyar’s book, Preparing for College: Nine Elements of Effective Outreach, which noted that taking a rigorous college preparatory curriculum is “the key to college access.” The authors found that taking a rigorous academic curriculum that includes a strong mathematics component is the most consistently successful way of boosting college attendance and success, beating out mentoring, tutoring, summer programs, and many other popular means of helping students get to college. While they do not denigrate such programs (some types of programs lack evidence, not promise), it is clear that a strong set of academic classes in high school does make all the difference in college access and success.

The final piece of evidence is the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation report on high school dropouts, “The Silent Epidemic,” published this month. Former students reported to researchers that they might have stayed in school had they faced a more challenging curriculum and adults who held them to high standards. Many of these dropouts had high expectations of themselves, but did not find challenge or relevance in high school, leading them to a dead end.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s psychological concept of flow helps explain why setting challenging goals for young people is critical. When people are faced with tasks that both challenge them, and are within reach of their abilities, they feel motivated to take them on. However, faced with tasks that have no challenge, or tasks that are simply out of reach, they give up. Unfortunately, if high school students give up on mathematics, reading or writing in high school, limp to graduation, and then enroll in higher education, they are part of a flow that leads to remedial classes, and eventual stopping -- or dropping out.

If college and universities worked with high schools to promote rigorous classes, relevant curriculum, and to give students in high school a vision of what they could become, both institutions would benefit greatly. The greatest area of need, as the Gate Foundation study points out, is for teaching methods that effectively engage and motivate students, and colleges and universities are critical to providing that professional development to teachers.

However, it is also important to address public and lawmaker perspectives on retention and graduation. Adelman makes a strong argument that students and their choices need to stand at the center of the debate on high school and college success. High schools and colleges need to do their utmost to promote success and opportunity, but need to remind people that while they can offer incentives, they cannot choose for students. Students themselves choose AP Calculus or study hall in high school, and they can choose to take classes over the summer in college or drink with their friends. Public officials, policymakers, the public and parents need to hear this message more often.

To recognize that students make their own decisions is not to let institutions off the hook. The federal government needs to support programs that promote college readiness, such as GEAR UP and Upward Bound, rather than annual proposing their destruction. Whether funded by federal money or not, college and universities need to provide middle and high school students with accurate and timely information about where they stand and what they need to do to achieve college admission and readiness. University access and mentoring programs need also to be expanded, and must target the students most in need of them.

Colleges and universities need a proactive strategy for working with K-12 schools to promote college readiness, and to encourage middle and high school students to do the work that will prepare them for college success. From a retention and graduation rate perspective, colleges and universities need more students with a strong academic core, who have had college-level experiences before enrolling freshman year, and who are prepared to work hard at being a college student -- and fewer students who expect the college experience to be what they have seen on Laguna Beach, Beverly Hills 90210 or (worst of all) Saved by the Bell: the College Years.