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Prep Talk

November 30, 2011

Pioneers in teacher prep chart changes in training landscape

by Geoff Decker, at 5:15 pm

If the people on a panel Tuesday about teacher preparation didn’t convey the urgency they felt about improving teacher training, then a flash poll of the audience surely did.

More than two-thirds of the audience, made up primarily of young teachers, said they didn’t think their masters degrees had made them better at their jobs, according to electronic votes that were tallied in real time.

With that context, a five-member panel of advocates for alternative certification and training dove into a 90-minute discussion about how traditional theory-driven teacher training had failed the profession, particularly in high-needs urban schools. Research has shown that having a masters degree does not make teachers more effective, and local, state, and federal efforts are underway to re-imagine how teachers are trained.

Panelists largely agreed that many traditional education schools lack accountability, aren’t willing to share performance data for their graduates, and have a detached relationship with the public schools where their graduates eventually work.

“For too long schools of [education] have sat back and spun out academic theories of what should work in the ideal school with the ideal conditions,” said a panelist, Bob Hughes, president of the nonprofit New Visions for Public Schools, which trains and certifies teachers and operates 99 schools in New York City. “And they’ve been divorced from the reality of what happens in schools .”

Joining Hughes on the panel were representatives of alternative training programs that are being pioneered in New York City: Maritza Macdonald, head of the soon-to-be-launched urban residency program for science teachers at the American Museum of Natural History; Mayme Hostetter, dean of Relay Graduate School of Education, the brand-new certification program created by three charter networks; and Kat Hayes, of The New Teacher Project, which handles recruitment and training for the New York City Teaching Fellows.

The panel was held at the American Museum of Natural History and hosted by Educators 4 Excellence, an organization of young teachers that advocates for reform in the teaching profession, including an evaluation system that takes test scores into account and an end to seniority-based layoffs. NY1 education reporter Lindsay Christ moderated.

Also on the panel was David Steiner, dean of Hunter College’s school of education and the former New York State education commissioner. As commissioner, Steiner expanded the role of alternative training programs to allow them to certify teachers, a policy that two of his co-panelists — Hostetter and Macdonald — are now making the most of with their certification programs.

Steiner said the culture of teacher preparation programs supported ”a huge divide between content and method” that was not producing highly-effective classroom educators. He equated the programs to a hospital that provides only a bare minimum of care.

“They’ll help make sure the patient doesn’t die, but it wont actually make the patient much better,” Steiner said.

The panel didn’t just harp on what was wrong with current teacher preparation programs — members also suggested ways to improve them.

Steiner, who complained about gridlock in Albany after resigning as commissioner, said “one of the easiest things to do” in New York would be to make licensing exams harder to pass, something that has been done successfully in Massachusetts. Currently, less than 1 percent of test-takers fail New York’s exam.

Hostetter’s Relay program is known for its performance requirements to be eligible for graduation. Teachers in that program can’t graduate unless they have helped their students grow at least one year in one year’s time, according to specific assessment standards.

To an extent, the panelists were actually preaching to the choir. The majority – about two-thirds – of the audience had taken alternate routes to certification, meaning they had enrolled in many of the same programs supported by the panelists.

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  • Lou

     The nuts and bolts of teaching are skills that you pick up on the job. A great quote that is common among police officers is: “Don’t believe everything they teach ya’ in the academy kid”. This quote rings just as true in the educational profession.

  • Mook

    Less than a third?  How does that convey urgency?

  • Vote NO!

    How  do  we  know    all  of  these  alternative  certification  programs  produce  “effective”  teachers?

    How  about  giving  a  prospective  teacher  the  standardized  exam  their  students  will  be  required  to  pass  in  order  to  be  promoted,  or  graduate?

  • Gdecker

    Mook – thanks for catching. I wrote that statistic the wrong way. It’s actually two-thirds of the audience felt that way (duh). Sorry for the confusion. It’s fixed now. 

  • Nycdoenuts

    I am familiar with no research that has shown that having a Masters degree doesn’t make you more effective as a teacher. it’s not that I’m not tempted to agree with the notion. I am.

    But how in the world would it be possible to prove (our show) that having a Masters doesn’t make you more effective? It sounds like something that is impossible to show.

    I ask this because reformers have tended to start sentences with the words “Research shows” and then finish those sentences adding things that research has never (ever) shown. So I think it’s a perfectly fair question to ask.

    So I challenge anyone here who is familiar with such research to reply to this thread and name the study.

  • Pjg320

    Steiner is correct, raise the bar, currently CUNY requires a 2.5 GPA for acceptance to teacher ed, it should move incrementally to 3.25 and State exams should become much more difficult, half of all teachers failed the biology content exam that was at a Regents Exam level, pathetic.

  • http://twitter.com/BNiche B

    If I’m not mistaken, it is now required for every public school teacher in NYC to have a Masters (or working towards one through an alternative teaching program). In that case, you can try to make one of two kinds of comparisons:

    1) Compare student data from the early 2000s and before when the Masters requirement wasn’t as strict. This would be using old testing data, which is quite dubious at best due to the numerous test changes and moving the bar for proficiency.

    2) Use TfA recruit data their first two years while they work towards a Masters (but don’t actually have one), which as even GS has been posting the last few days, the data coming back from TfA has been mixed.
    I personally don’t see any other kind of research that would work, but I could be wrong completely.

  • Nycdoenuts

    B,
    I see your point and it may well be a god idea, but at the same time, it’s important for me to point out that a study like that has never been done (none that I’m aware of anyway)

    So then why would someone hold a meeting and claim that “research shows” something that research has never shown? It’s a lie!! My question is … why lie?

    it reminds me of a claim made a year or so ago that teachers are less effective as they get older. Do you remember this one? Older teachers are less effective, so they should be laid off first? People had claimed that research showed this to be true, when there was no research to show it at all. I remember reading a GS pece about it and the author actually had to insert a sentence to clarify that there was no empirical research about it and that in fact the only study ever that was related to it was conducted by the NYTimes (and that study showed no marked decrease in teacher effectiveness as teacher experience increased psst seven years).

    Yet because the original claim starting out with the words “research” and “shows”, it looked like the claim was a valid one. When it wasn’t! It was a 100% lie!

    I think this is too. And without naming any organizations, I challenge someone from one of the groups who hosted or was represented at this event to name the study that”shows” a Masters degree doesn’t make a teacher more effective.

  • Ken Hirsh

    Marcus Winters (Manhattan Institute) wrote a review post in September:

    http://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/ib_10.htmHe concludes: “Not a single one of the 34 studies that used a “high-quality” methodology (i.e., methodology that accounted for previous student test scores) evaluated in a recent review of the research by Eric Hanushek and Steven Rivkin found a relationship between a teacher’s earning a master’s degree and student achievement.”

    You can question the research, but there is definitely a ton of it that suggests no relationship between earning a master’s degree and teacher effectiveness.

    Some thoughts:

    1. Based on my limited non-professional experience, this is NOT one of the more controversial topics in the literature.  WIth that said…

    2. There are certainly some studies that conclude that a Master’s Degree is significant, but I think there are many more that conclude the opposite.  

    3. You can search scholar.google.com if you’d like to do your own review.  Unfortunately, most publishers charge to download entire articles.

    4. Unfortunately, it seems that many of the studies come from the “usual suspects” with the expected conclusions based on their alleged leanings.  

    5. I noticed a review article by Linda Darling Hammond that I’m going to take a look at… since she is definitely not a “usual suspect”, I’ll be curious to see what she has to say.  Unfortunately, the article is from 2002, so it might be a bit outdated.

  • Ken Hirsh

    Another attempt at the Marcus Winters link:

    http://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/ib_10.htm

  • Nycdoenuts

    Ken,
    THANKS. clearly I was mistaken and I appreciate you taking the time out to find and post that link.
    Yes to your comment about it coming from the usual suspects, and there would be lots that I could say toward that (and toward how effectiveness is measured using ONLY standardized exams (and from Florida)), but I’ll save that for another time. For now, thanks very much. I stand corrected.

  • http://twitter.com/nycdoenuts NYCDOEnuts

    Sorry, just to be clear: I’m (of course) not going to accept that as the final word about whether students benefit from a having a teacher who is highly qualified via a Masters’ degree. Nonetheless, I appreciate you posting the link.

  • Anonymous

    To NYCDOENUTS (below)

    I believe statistic about MA degrees cited in the article was survey data based on teacher perceptions (of the teachers in the audience), but here are some links to research showing that MA degrees do not correlate with gains to teacher effectiveness:

    http://cecr.ed.gov/guides/researchSyntheses/Research%20Synthesis_Q%20A2.pdf

    http://www.econ.ucsb.edu/~jon/Econ230C/HanushekRivkin.pdf

  • NYCparent

    It is preposterous to throw TFAers into classrooms on their own with just five weeks of training.  It is equally preposterous to have ed-school students wait until the END of their training to start assistant teaching.  The TFAers should in fact ONLY be assistant teachers (as Wendy Kopp had originally envisioned), and the ed-school students should start assistant teaching early in their training.  That way they can see firsthand whether teaching is really something they are going to want to do.  The Teacher’s College graduate psychology program, for instance, has students working with patients — under close supervision — six months into their five-year program.

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