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Who Teaches the Teachers?

Art by Emily Reif.

On November 8, 1965, Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Higher Education Act (HEA) into law. A key legislative pillar of his Great Society agenda, the HEA has since become a cornerstone of federal education policy. The law was originally intended to be reshaped and reauthorized every few years in order to reflect the changing priorities of American society. After its expiration in 2013, the bill now sits at one of these crossroads. The HEA establishes several student loan initiatives, including Federal Stafford Loans and the Federal Pell Grant Program. It also requires the collection of some student demographic data and sets up the structures for federal university funding. In short, if you’ve ever taken out a student loan or even just enrolled in a college class, then you have felt the effects of the HEA. But what is often forgotten amidst the high-profile debates surrounding this bill is the imperfect but critical role the Act plays in supporting, financing and regulating a teacher’s initial training. With the bill’s potential reauthorization comes a chance to extend this support to long-term training: ensuring teachers improve — and stay — in the classroom.

Title II of the HEA is instrumental in these efforts. While there isn’t a strong consensus on how teacher training programs should function, Title II provides funding and support for a wide variety of programs. The majority of teachers take one of two routes: the consecutive model, in which teachers secure an undergraduate degree and then obtain a teaching or other graduate degree; or the concurrent model, in which an undergraduate degree and teacher certification are obtained simultaneously. As teacher training programs in the United States have proliferated, a significant minority of them have experimented with these two standard models to produce alternate pathways, such as Teach for America’s fast-tracked training and immersive experience program, referred to as the community-based teacher education model.

The HEA’s specific focus on pre-licensure teacher training programs overemphasizes the effect that any such program can have on educators’ abilities before their first day of school. Even with research funds and regulatory policies attempting to advance teacher training, no program has dramatically outshone its peers in producing high-quality teachers. First-year teachers certified by traditional college teacher preparation programs are generally as effective as first-year teachers certified by alternative pathways. This lack of distinction indicates that the quality of the training program is not a central determinant of a teacher’s future success — or failure. If policymakers, then, hope to improve the quality of the teaching force, they will have to pay more attention to relatively unaddressed factors.

Most educators’ improvements come from lessons learned during their start in the classroom, because in those initial years teachers acquire the skills that make them successful. The first year of teaching finds educators at their least effective. Value-added measures — metrics that compare the growth in a teacher’s class test scores to the average growth of a teacher’s district or state — have shown that teacher effectiveness improves dramatically during the first three years of teaching. Therefore, it is during those initial years that novice teachers should receive additional instruction and support. This is especially crucial for two reasons. First, the learning curve for teachers quickly begins to flatten after those first few years. Second, those years are when a large portion of teachers drop out — an unfortunate problem in a system already hobbled by a lack of good teachers. In short, it’s less the quality of teachers’ degrees and more their first three years of experience that act as good indicators of future teaching ability.

In its most recent manifestation, Title II allowed for the use of federal funds to ensure that all teacher training programs report on student demographics, program curricula and the ability of their graduates to pass state licensure exams. The HEA then directs the states to use that information to identify low-performing teacher training programs. Essentially, states develop report cards on the programs. By giving stakeholders the information necessary to delineate between successful and problematic teacher training programs, the HEA attempts to ensure that teachers are more capable in the classroom.

So far, teacher instruction programs barely pass. This is despite the fact that in 2010, only 37 of over 1,400 teacher training programs nationwide had been designated as low performers. Over half of the states have failed to identify even one low-performing program in the last decade. But while the scarcity of low-scoring programs might suggest that the American educational system is functioning well — or at least that teachers are performing adequately — this is not the case. According to the Program for International Student Assessment test, an exam given to 15-year-olds around the world, the United States recently placed 30th in the world for mathematics and 20th for English. And according to a 2012 Gallup poll, only 29 percent of parents in the United States had a “great deal of confidence” in public schools’ ability to educate their children. If teacher training programs are supposed to staff schools with good teachers, they currently deserve more condemnation than commendation. Moving forward, political capital should be used for what has been shown to work: programs that foster teachers’ development in their first three years.

Already in place are local programs that successfully embody this paradigm. Cincinnati Public Schools (CPS) experimented with this principle by instituting a transparent teacher evaluation model. Instead of providing a single, annual and numeric grade that offers very little guidance on improvement, CPS combined classroom observations with value-added scores to produce a measure that specified areas for improvement at multiple junctures throughout the year. By focusing on growth over time, the program improves the effectiveness of teachers post-licensure.

The Boston Teacher Residency program also typifies the kind of focus needed to improve educators’ performance. Run by the school district, the program is modeled on medical residency programs. Teachers accepted into the program complete academic coursework in the field of teaching while working with a mentor to hone their skills. Tennessee’s Department of Education is also testing teacher-to-teacher mentoring. The department created a program in which more proficient teachers coach peers in their weakest areas, in order for schools to actively boost their academic progress. In addition to helping novice teachers continue to develop their prowess, the program also fosters a supportive environment in Tennessee’s public schools — a factor crucial to attracting and keeping successful educators in the system.

Any expanded definition of teacher training that includes the first three years of a teacher’s career should be accompanied by better — and sustained — accountability mechanisms. Tennessee’s Department of Education gets a gold star for championing these efforts as well. In a separate program, the state embarked on a new initiative to merge the records of its teachers over time to bolster accountability for schools and training programs. By linking teachers’ efficacy and value-added measures through the state’s evaluation program, Tennessee is tracking the experiences that lead to the development of its best employees. Instead of focusing governmental resources entirely on better preparing teachers for their initial entry to the classroom, Tennessee’s approach should be replicated on the national stage as a longer process that also encompasses the experiences of teachers on the job.

In each of the United States’ 50 largest school districts, approximately 10,000 of the best-performing instructors leave their districts each year.Keeping good teachers in classrooms constitutes a major problem for the public school system and, as a result, has consistently sat at the epicenter of teacher training programs. However, it should also function as a key plank in the evaluation processes of those initiatives. The profession has a higher rate of exit to entry than most others. In each of the United States’ 50 largest school districts, approximately 10,000 of the best-performing instructors leave their districts each year. Training high-caliber teachers is difficult, and a grossly underperforming public school system cannot afford to lose its most adept employees. To make matters worse, untested educators often fill the places of outgoing, experienced ones. Combating the high rate of teacher turnover means that the HEA and other government legislation’s attempts to locate exceptional training programs must not only center on the ability, but also the longevity, of the teachers these programs produce.

Cincinnati, Boston and Tennessee have created systems that are in a class of their own. Their curricula share a commitment to developing teachers’ skills post-licensure and keeping the most capable teachers in the classrooms where their expertise is most needed. The first few years on the job serve as a distinguishing time in teachers’ careers for an additional reason: It is during this period that the profession observes simultaneously a great improvement and a deep depletion of its members. If quality teachers are to be retained, this period deserves to be a focal point of those efforts.

The renewal of the Act is an opportunity to amend and improve it. The most recent reauthorization of the HEA was in 2008; the major change was a requirement that institutions of higher-level education post price calculators on their websites in order to help students contextualize student aid programs. Hopefully this time around, the changes to the HEA will strike at the provisions designed to advance and sustain teaching throughout the United States. While reforming teacher training can feel at times like nails on a chalkboard, a reimagined HEA will go a long way towards dulling the noise. The National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators has already jumped on the upcoming reauthorization, offering 61 recommendations that focus on promoting access to higher education and improving aid options. But as the HEA is reconsidered, politicians must prioritize training efforts as well. It is high time that they table their outdated focus on pre-licensure training programs and broaden the scope for scrutinizing teacher training to include everything from the time they are students to the years they spend standing in front of their own.

Art by Emily Reif 

About the Author

Meghan Holloway ‘16 is a Health and Human Biology and Economics concentrator and a section manager at BPR.

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