Teacher Beat

A study financed by the Eli & Edythe Broad Foundation shows that students taught by Teach For America teachers in Los Angeles outperformed peers who were taught by other teachers—including veterans with many more years of experience.

Initially, the study was performed for internal purposes. Having provided quite a bundle of financial backing for TFA, Broad wanted to get a sense of how its investment was paying off in terms of stronger student learning. But officials for the group said they ultimately decided to make the study public given the growing national conversation about teacher effectiveness.

California state test-score results of students of 119 second-year TFA teachers in grades 2-12 were compared with those of the students of 1,190 non-TFA teachers in the same grade levels, subjects, and schools as the TFA teachers, during 2005 and 2006.

The results are interesting for a few reasons. First of all, TFA teachers were linked to test scores that were 3 points higher overall than non-TFA teachers, even those who had been in the classroom much longer. And, they were even more effective than other teachers with similar years of teaching experience. (The scores for that comparison were 4 points higher for TFA teachers than for non-TFA teachers.)

It's important to know, though, that since students weren't randomly assigned to TFA teachers or non-TFA teachers, it isn't scientifically possible to say that TFA is the reason why the teachers were more effective. These data are certainly suggestive, but they aren't evidence of a causal link.

And with any study, there are a couple of caveats. For instance, the findings here combine reading and math, so it's not entirely clear how to interpret them for subject matter. Content area is an important distinction because previous studies of TFA have shown that the group's high school instructors had a particularly strong correlation with improved math achievement.

The folks at Broad think this type of analysis could be indicative of what will be possible once data systems continue to grow and students can be linked to teachers. One interesting feature of the study is that analysts used two different growth methodologies and found that one was much better at explaining variability in test scores. That's important because there isn't really good consensus on the "best" methodology for gauging teacher effect on student achievement.

Second, the paper is an example of the kind of analysis that might be useful for higher ed institutions and programs that prepare teachers as they consider ways of improving the effectiveness of their own programs.

TFA has already begun those efforts, as I reported earlier this year.

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Mathematica Policy Research has a report out looking at a small group of teachers who earned their teaching credentials through the American Board for the Certification of Teacher Excellence program.

ABCTE is a national alternative route that allows candidates to bypass most education coursework.

Students taught by the 25 English language-arts teachers studied did not have statistically different achievement results on the state test than those students taught by a "matched" comparison group on non-ABCTE teachers with similar characteristics. But students of the 18 ABCTE teachers scored lower than their counterparts in math by about 25 percent of a standard deviation. (The report says that means the classroom average would have been about 10 percentile points lower in the ABCTE-taught classes).

This is one of the first studies to look at the impact of teachers who earn this credential on student achievement, but the small sample size means the results probably shouldn't be extrapolated beyond this particular group of teachers and applied to the ABCTE program as a whole, said Steven Glazerman, one of the Mathematica analysts who conducted the study.

And because this isn't a "randomized" study, where students are randomly assigned to teachers, it's not clear whether other factors might be influencing the results. (Do ABCTE teachers tend to be assigned, or to seek out, high-poverty schools? Do principals assign them different kinds of students?)

The ABCTE folks are, unsurprisingly, not thrilled by the results. “We had hoped for a much larger and more balanced sample size and we were disappointed that this paper was not submitted for peer-review," said ABCTE president David Saba in a statement. "ABCTE has issued over 1,900 certifications but only 30 ABCTE certified teachers were studied by Mathematica. ... This sample size is just too small to conclude anything except that this deserves further study.”

Saba also noted that many of the teachers studied were veterans who needed to become fully certified in order to stay in the classroom, not the career-changers and new teachers that the group targets.

When I asked Glazerman if this study is the tip of the iceberg where ABCTE is concerned, he sighed. "I would love it if there were an iceberg," he said.

One of the challenges, he explained, is that the number of ABCTE teachers who work in tested grades and subjects and have enough sequential years of student-achievement data to be studied is not great enough to get to the sample you'd need to make broad generalizations about the program.

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from guest blogger Lesli A. Maxwell

California's budget is busted and school districts have had to let teachers go, but that's not keeping a new organization from pledging to deliver a bevy of new teacher talent to the state's public schools over the next 11 years.

Today, an informal network of folks who oversee 70 separate alternative teacher certification programs around the state are launching a formal membership organization that aims to find top-notch professional people who want a second career in the classroom.

Called the California Teacher Corps, the organization has one particularly lofty goal: grooming 100,000 new teachers and placing them in classrooms by 2020. That's a big number, even by California standards.

The group particularly wants to help cultivate new teaching talent in the state's rural and urban pockets where school district leaders struggle most with recruitment, hiring, and retention.

"Our primary goal is to recruit the best and the brightest teachers," said Catherine Kearney, the president of the newly-formed Corps. "We think by working together in a formal way we can really begin to address teacher preparation issues in California including the critical need for special education, science, and math teachers."

By pooling resources in a formal organization, Ms. Kearney said, the Corps hopes to reach smart, motivated professionals who may not have considered teaching. "We want the pathway to be wide open," she said. Most of the alternative programs are affiliated with colleges and universities though a handful of county offices of education and charter management organizations have their own accredited programs.

Ms. Kearney said that more than half of the graduates in the state's alternative certification programs are ethnic or racial minorities and that participants in the programs are overwhelmingly drawn to a second career in teaching by social justice motives.

While teachers have lost jobs this year because of the state's fiscal crisis, a wave of teacher retirements is expected in the coming years, some 8,000 annually, according to a report last year by WestEd.

"We really think this is the time to be proactive," Ms. Kearney said.

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From guest blogger Dakarai I. Aarons:

When an angry teacher confronted Chicago schools CEO Ron Huberman about a "secret" job fair the district was having today, he laughed it off and said every job fair was public.

"I can dispel the rumor,'' schools CEO Ron Huberman told the giggling crowd. "There are no secret teacher fairs. Any teacher fairs are public. Everyone is invited, and they are advertised.''

Turned out the joke was on Huberman.

Those invited, who included Teach For America teachers and members of the district's teaching fellows program, were told not to share the information with anyone else, or face not being invited to future events.

When he found out the district staff had sent invitation-only tickets, he ordered the fair opened to everyone and publicized, the Chicago Sun-Times reported.

Looks like Chicago teacher recruitment staffers will have to find another way to target the relatively few jobs open this year to the candidates they want.

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The folks over at the American Board for the Certification of Teacher Excellence have announced that their initial, $35 million start-up funding from the U.S. Department of Education sunsets this month.

ABCTE Director David Saba has indicated that the group won't seek additional federal funding and will tap into its own reserves to make up for the difference between enrollments and costs. The organization will be totally self-sustaining within four years, he projects.

To win the group's teaching certificate in an approved state, candidates must pass computer-based exams in content and pedagogy. They are given support from an outside mentor as they study for the exams.

ABCTE began in 2001 under the National Council on Teacher Quality, from which it eventually spun off in 2003. The group has had some notable successes and is now recognized as an approved route to teaching in nine states.

But it's had its fair share of obstacles, such as when California's credentialing body, in 2004, didn't pursue the option after teachers' unions and others marshaled their forces against the program. Texas officials also pulled out a year later after showing considerable interest in the program.

The research on the program is still fairly nascent. Its elementary teacher-licensing test is more difficult than the Praxis II test, a common state exam (mainly because of where those states set cut scores). A study tracking its candidates through their teaching careers to determine their effectiveness at raising student learning is still ongoing, although a much smaller internal study from a few years ago showed promising results.

I do wonder whether ABCTE's bid to be self sustaining—no small feat in itself— will be contingent on winning over a couple of additional states, or a state with a sizable population.

The Little Alt-Cert Program That Could is close to the top of the hill. What happens on the other side, though, is anyone's best guess.

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Perhaps no one but Teach For America will care about this, but a district court last week threw out an appeal in the Renee v. Spellings lawsuit over the "highly qualified" teacher provisions in the No Child Left Behind Law.

The law requires teachers to be fully certified to be deemed highly qualified, but the U.S. Department of Education's subsequent regulations allowed teachers in alternative-certification programs to be deemed highly qualified if they were making progress in their program and were on track to hold a teaching certificate within two years. A California group sued ED, lost the first round, and appealed.

The court dismissed the appeal mostly on procedural grounds, with ED arguing that the issue isn't "redressable," since California would likely just change its own definition to incorporate these teachers if the federal regulations were rendered invalid.

The brief is worth reading, though, for the dissenting opinion, which examines arguments that teachers in alternative routes are often concentrated in high-poverty, high-minority schools. That's probably true and it's a problem if the alternative routes in question aren't of high quality. But as a lot of studies are pointing out these days, paper qualifications and the various routes teachers take into the profession are not always very strong predictors of how well teachers are going to do in the classroom.

Now, the federal government is pushing states to be more serious about figuring out how to identify effective teachers and to home in on what attributes make for successful teacher preparation.

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There seems to be an awful lot of confusion among the 9,000 delegates at the National Education Association's Representative Assembly over how the Teach For America program works.

The catalyst for this discussion: A new business item that would have directed the NEA to encourage TFA to increase its corps members' commitment from two to three years and to require such members to complete a certified teacher-preparation program.

Nearly 45 minutes of discussion ensued. Some delegates asserted that the program contained a loan-forgiveness element, and NEA Executive Director John Wilson had to step up to the microphone to tell them that participating in TFA has nothing to do with loans.

Other delegates wanted to know the retention rates for corps members after their two-year commitments were up. NEA President Dennis Van Roekel put the figure at 33 percent, attributing the figure to TFA founder Wendy Kopp. (Can someone from TFA let us all know if that's correct?)

Another interesting tidbit: A Delaware delegate said that districts in his state are laying off teachers and hiring TFAers. I wrote about a similar situation in North Carolina, but hadn't heard anything about Delaware. Have you?

The item, in any case, failed to pass.

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In something of a nail-biter, the Connecticut legislature passed a bill in the waning days of a special session that will broaden some of the state's certification requirements. Like other states, Connecticut officials anticipate retirements in the near future and hope to attract more young teachers, as well as professionals seeking new careers.

According to this editorial in support of the changes, there was quite a bit of back and forth on the bill.

Among other items, the bill will expand the Teach For America program in the state, allow teachers of math and science to take content tests rather than coursework in order to receive state certification, and ease reciprocity so that teachers in other states can more easily come to work in the Constitution State.

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That's basically what American Federation of Teachers prez Randi Weingarten indicates in this letter to the district, reports Elizabeth Green at Gotham Schools.

Although principals are supposed to be hiring new teachers from the Absent Teacher Reserve pool of excessed teachers, schools can hire from other sources if they can't find a teacher of a high-need field from the ATR. In her letter, Weingarten intimates that the district is prioritizing teachers trained through alternative routes such as Teacher For America and New York City Teaching Fellows over traditional ed. school graduates.

But a source just passed along an e-mail the district sent to the city's colleges of education. (It's a long one, so you'll have to click below to read the whole thing.) In sum, it encourages the teacher colleges to make sure their graduates are aware of openings.

Continue reading "Is N.Y.C. Prioritizing TFA for Hiring?" »

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The Oklahoma legislature just OK'd (sorry, I couldn't resist) the certification of teachers through the American Board for Certification of Teacher Excellence, a national alternative-route program.

Nine states now support the credential, which is granted after candidates pass content-area and pedagogy tests. (The candidates get help and coaching from a pool of experienced teachers prior to taking the tests.) The states are Florida, Idaho, Mississippi, Missouri, New Hampshire, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina and Utah.

The bill, in fact, passed the Oklahoma House unanimously, 99-0. I'm told that's the first time legislation to approve the program has ever passed without some objection. Quite a far cry from 2004, when the California State Commission on Teacher Credentials voted not to move forward with ABCTE after teachers' unions and representatives of education schools protested.

David Saba, ABCTE's president, referenced a recent report by the National Commission on Teaching and America's future that found about half of Oklahoma's teaching force is composed of teachers older than 50.

"As they approach retirement age, it will be critical to have enough new teachers in the pipeline from all certification routes. We’re excited to work with school districts throughout Oklahoma to fill teaching vacancies with talented career-changers who can bring their real-world knowledge to the classroom," he said.

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Some academics and policy folks are pushing back on the findings of this Mathematica study that used an experimental design to compare the student-achievement results of kids taught by graduates of several-alternate route programs with those coming from traditional teachers' colleges. My colleague Mary Ann Zehr wrote a story about the study here.

These educators argue that the study generalizes the affects of traditional and alternative programs, doesn't delve deeply enough into the quality of coursework; and doesn't offer any road map for improving either kind of program.

In one such analysis, Stanford University professor Linda Darling-Hammond noted that both the alternative and traditional teachers had less training or coursework than most teachers do nationally and were pulled disproportionately from schools with exceptionally weak teaching forces."The sample of teachers cannot be generalized to districts and schools that draw from a better-prepared pool and hire much more selectively, or to the overall teaching pool nationally," she writes.

Barnett Berry of the Center for Teaching Quality says that the alternate-route candidates had more access to mentoring, possibly contaminating the comparison. In another post Berry writes that the study's examination of coursework did not delve into the quality of these courses, relying instead on descriptions pulled from syllabuses.

Jennifer Jennings, aka Eduwonkette, and Sean Corcoran asserted that the study's authors did not highlight the fact that many of the students taught by alternative-route programs lost ground over the course of the year: "Throughout the report, the authors find numerous cases of negative outcomes associated with [alternatively certified] teachers, but more often than not choose to deemphasize these findings."

Fellow blogger Skoolboy (aka Aaron Pallas) has this analysis. "We get a pretty clean estimate of the relative effectiveness of pairs of traditional-route and alternate-route teachers that are not representative of any population of teacher education programs, teachers, or schools," he writes. Moreover, the study, he states, does not account for the self-selection of teachers into various preparation models, nor for the fact that the teachers studied were those who drop out after just a few years.

My take on all this is that all the routes studied here were pretty crummy, and we still have a long way to go to figure out the models of teacher preparation that produce effective teachers and suit their needs. I'd like to know how various types of models might be equally effective, but offer different approaches, depending on the candidate's personal situation (undergrad, grad, career-changer, adjunct, coach, etc.)

If the worry is about coursework, for instance, the answers to the questions of when it should take place and what it should consist of are going to depend on the specific needs of the teacher candidate. Even great coursework may stress out a career-changer teacher who's already putting in 12-hour days; that coursework might need to be sequenced differently from an undergraduate, who is taking it while student teaching.

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Today, the Center for American Progress released a paper about how states could work to improve alternative certification programs, and it explores the fundamental tension that such programs face: Ensuring that these programs both fit the needs of people who want to enter teaching (i.e., with flexible hours and a faster pathway to teaching), but also appropriately prepare candidates for success in classrooms.

It builds on a 2007 report from the National Council on Teacher Quality, which found that many alternative-certification programs are alternative in name only. Such programs, that report found, have similar coursework loads, don't necessarily provide stronger mentoring or clinical components, and they are sometimes even located in education schools.

There are many interesting things to be gleaned from the paper, but one that I think is most compelling is its idea that states should step up efforts to ensure that alternative certification programs are held to a high standard of quality but offer flexible ways of meeting requirements.

For instance, the report's author, Robin Chait, suggests that states set subject-matter competency requirements but allow candidates different ways of demonstrating competency. That is, candidates should be able to meet such requirements by holding a major or passing a test, rather than having to meet two or three different requirements (coursework, a major, and a test.)

"There is little to no research that shows that a major is more predictive of teacher effectiveness than proven proficiency on a competency exam," Chait writes.

UPDATE: I neglected to mention that Teach For America state-policy director Michele McLaughlin (perhaps better known as former AFT-ie blogger "one-L") co-wrote the report. Teacher Beat regrets the omission.

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I think Liana's on to something when she suggests below that the economic downturn could benefit alternative certification, as newly laid-off professionals seek stable jobs and think about changing careers.

Consider alternate-route provider American Board for the Certification of Teacher Excellence, which saw record enrollments in January with 496 teachers-to-be signing on. In most months, the figure hovers at about 200. ABCTE did offer a discount on its program, which typically costs $850, but its leaders think there's more to it than that.

“The downturn in the economy could end up being a blessing in disguise for school districts looking to hire quality teachers and we’re able to provide them with rigorously-tested professionals ready to bring their real world knowledge to students," ABCTE President David Saba said in a release.

The organization has generally been considered the scrappy new player on the national alt-route scene, but maybe that will change now that enrollments are up and alternative routes seem to be passing the "first, do no harm" maxim in the profession, per this report.

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Several former Teach For America alumni are campaigning for Sen. Barack Obama, my colleague David Hoff reports in this week's edition of Education Week (check back here on our Ed Week homepage tomorrow for the full story). Sen. John McCain, too, has said he wants to increase the number of alternative-route teachers in America's classrooms.

Meanwhile, there are a bunch of new legislative plugs for the program, which puts high-achieving college graduates from top schools into some of the nation's toughest schools.

The bipartisan, newly reauthorized HEA bill authorizes $20 million for TFA for fiscal 2009 and $25 million for fiscal 2010. And there's a new TFA grant in the NCLB-improvements bill introduced recently by Rep. Michael Castle, R-Del.,

Rep. Castle's bill would require an evaluation every three years of the performance of students taught by TFA-ers compared with those taught by non-TFA teachers "in the same schools and positions."

I wonder what Obama's adviser Linda Darling-Hammond, who's no fan of TFA and has done a couple of critical studies on the program, thinks of all this attention?

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