| NCLB and highly qualified teachers |
6/8/04 6:58 PM |
| Author:
Barnett Berry
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We have done a great deal of work at the Southeast Center for Teaching Quality in examining this issue of what it means to be "highly qualified." In particular, this past year we spent a great deal of time in 24 schools in 12 districts in 4 states figuring out how the No Child Left Behind teacher quality mandates are playing out. (Watch for our report to come out this summer at http://www.teachingquality.org.
In the course of our work, we found that the current federal implementation strategy leaves school administrators scrambling to have teachers pass multiple-choice, content tests that do little to probe a teacher's ability to teach the content to a diverse student population. Teachers are having to teach more and more children who are second language learners, but only small fraction of teachers have any preparation for serving these kids.
Similarly, many teachers are required to take additional university-based content courses that may not address teaching strategies that have been shown to improve learning in schools with diverse student populations. In the sites we visited — all which could be classified as either rural or urban hard-to-staff schools, administrators have had to rely on alternative certification candidates, virtually all of them unable to meet the needs of the students they serve. They just do not know enough about classroom management, curriculum planning, assessment, and the like.
As was noted, content knowledge is necessary, but clearly not sufficient. I suspect this issue of what teachers need to know and do could be more profound in small charter schools, where teachers need to know and teach multiple subjects.
The problem here is that most arts and sciences faculties do not offer prospective teachers much in terms of teaching in interdisciplinary ways, and most teacher education programs do not prepare teachers for the new leadership roles they need to play in charter schools.
As Robin suggests, many colleges of education have not done the job they need to do. So what must we do?
1. More investments need to be made in school systems and universities that recruit and prepare teachers specifically for urban and rural hard-to-staff schools. Several foundations, including the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Kauffman Foundation, and the Osborne Foundation, have launched a series of teacher education initiatives that recognize the need for special preparation for teaching in hard-to-staff schools. A model worth emulating is the highly effective UCLA teacher education program - Center X - which is designed to attract academically able students and prepare them deeply in a two-year program that readies them to radically improve urban schooling for California's racially, culturally, and linguistically diverse children.
2. More needs to done to open up teaching to more than the traditional age college student in a traditional university-based preparation program - but good alternative route programs do not have to sacrifice quality for quantity. One promising example is the Academy for Urban School Leadership in Chicago.
3. More needs to be done to create multiple and more complete measures of a teachers' knowledge of students, teaching, and community. A prototype for what needs to be done can be found in Connecticut where a portfolio assessment system provides rich information about novices and has been shown to weed out weak candidates and develop good ones.
4. School districts and universities must be more inventive in making use of accomplished teachers to prepare and support teacher candidates through alternative routes and in new teacher induction programs - and the federal government should invest heavily in the models that work.
5. Much more needs to be done about teacher salaries and working conditions. Too many critics of the teaching profession today are stunningly silent on the need to raise teachers' salaries. How can one even contemplate the phrase "highly qualified teachers" without considering the need to raise teacher pay - when today's "inflation-adjusted" average teacher salary is only 7% higher than the average teacher salary three decades ago. This does not mean teachers need to be paid differently - they do, and there are some interesting models brewing like the one in Denver where support from several foundations (like Broad) is fueling some promising administrator-union collaboration around alternative compensation.
It is time to get off the content knowledge versus pedagogy debates - and do what is best for children....meaning that more comprehensive and coherent teacher development systems need to be put in place.
Posted as a reply to:
Teacher Competency by Robin Axworthy
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