Why can’t ed colleges match Teach for America?

Maureen, I am sure you will admit it is much easier to move the footall down the field if you are at the 45 yard line as opposed to being 20 yards away from scoring. I bet a check would reveal that many schools used were on the 50 yard (or maybe even in their own side of the field). Those schools would be where the job openings would first occur. In addition, I bet it is much easier to attract an older (and wiser) employee in a down market than in healthy economic times.

Thus a first year employee out of the schools of education would be much younger and with little work experience and very little interaction with children. On the other hand, TFA teachers would have older workers (sorry but life experience can not be ignored when dealing with kids) and more of a professional focus which is more typical of older workers.

Thus a young new teacher out of the school of education in a poor school is not the same employee which the TFA is putting in the teaching field.

Kind of like a 9th grade football player playing on the varsity team Friday night. There are exceptions but usually not the same player. (that is why they have freshmen football teams)

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@Maureen–Can we say with absolute certainty that value-added measures are reliable? Once again, even the federal DOE’s own study cites a 25% error rate. Is this fair?

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I assume that Maureen’s response was intended for me and not the @Peter who contributed before I did.

One fact that most people overlook is that, at least at UGA, the pool we draw from is made up of outstanding students. It’s rare to find a student in my classes who was not enrolled in Gifted/Talented, Advanced Placement, or Honors classes throughout high school. Last year’s undergraduate cohort averaged a 3.7 GPA in their UGA coursework. The idea that all education students are from the lowest quartile is easily disputed by simple and easily available data.

This is not to say that TFA does not recruit smart people, and I think that it’s great that they are drawing some of them into the classroom, however briefly. But there are plenty of smart people from university teacher education programs as well, and I know because I teach them. The idea that TFA’s approach can replace university programs wholesale because their grads produced good test scores in one study overlooks the relatively small scope of their endeavor vs. the great numbers of teachers produced in university programs who I think would not benefit from a 5-week boot camp as their sole preparation for the challenges of the classroom.

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As a former teacher and current educational researcher, I agree with all the comments that we can’t measure teachers by test scores and that TFA recruits’ retention rates are an enormous problem. However, even if we take Maureen at her word that three studies have proven that TFA recruits are more effective, let’s look at the studies… In the particular NC study cited here (if you go to the original study and read the “evidence” tables yourself), you will see that, while there are 40% of ELA teachers who have statistically significant positive impacts, this only amounts to 10 teachers. Then add only 6 science teachers and 9 social studies teachers. Thus, we are claiming that TFA is more effective based on the fact that only TWENTY-FIVE teachers in the entire state had statistically significant gains. For comparison, look at Tennessee State, who produced 30 science teachers. Sure, the percentage looks lower for “successful” science teachers, but it equates to 6 teachers total, same as TFA. I am absolutely NOT discounting the fact that, for students in these 25 TFA classrooms, a difference was made, and yes, that is wonderful. But, why continue to bash education schools based on the results of 25 teachers?

Further, there are just as many studies that have “disproven” the effectiveness of TFA recruits. For those studies, see the work of David Berliner or Linda-Darling Hammond: http://www.nctaf.org/resources/news/press_releases/documents/Stanford-teacher_certification_report.pdf.

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Maureen….Often, the top teachers from top teacher prep programs and universities do not want to teach in “difficult” schools. Whereas I might have 250+ applicants for a teaching position some schools have to take whoever they can get.

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I was not TFA – but did go through an alternative certification program and I think that the model used by TFA and alternative prep programs to train teachers can be very effective, but has its limitations. I have a degree in history and I teach high school history. Needless to say, my degree helps me out. I would NOT feel comfortable going into an elementary school and trying to teach reading.

I think that what helps alternatively certified teachers is the way that they are trained. To obtain my clear renewable certificate I had to take evening and summer classes from the school of education at the local college. So while my classmates, mostly undergraduates ages 19-21, were worried about their classes, student events, etc…, I was sitting in class thinking about how what I was learning would help me the next day and was able to immediately implement the theories of instruction that were being taught. My classmates were basically cramming stuff out of the textbook and then wouldn’t implement it for 2-3 years, after they were done student teaching. I don’t think that many (not all) of the education programs are severely lacking in that they don’t prepare or train teachers for what they’ll actually be doing.

Just a bit of personal experience as evidence. In my first year I was located next door to another first year teacher who was fresh out of her college program and student teaching. She was lost. If I had a dime for every time she said, “I’m not prepared for this” then I could fund education reform and eliminate furloughs. We were both ill prepared that first year and were learning how to be teachers (with very rough students because the best teachers don’t want the bad students usually) virtually on the fly. The difference is that after school got out I was going to receive follow up training and additional support. The professors in those classes knew I was in a classroom and would frequently meet and email me, offer assistance. She was out to dry and couldn’t get her former professors to even email her back. Instead she had to rely on the support of our department head, who was in her last year before retirement and was definitely in cruise control mode and not very helpful. To follow up on this – six years later, I’ve been one of our finalists for teacher of the year, I’m the history teacher the parents beat down the door to get their kids in my class, while the students dread the reputation and rigor of my classes. She’s on a PDP now and is completely burned out (we aren’t at the same school anymore so I’m not much help to her)

With all of this being said – I think that alternative certification programs like TFA can be very effective IFthe teachers are in the right setting and are in their field of expertise and if they’ve got their training and support system accessible and nearby. However, ultimately it comes down to the quality of the individual in the program, not the quality of the program in the individual, in my opinion.

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Does anyone know the retention rate for Teach for America teachers? My understanding is that it is very low. Most of the young people I know who have taught for this program are going on to other degrees – law, medical, etc. after a few years in this program.

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I am the mentoring coordinator at my school (unpaid, of course) and have worked with dozens of novice teachers over the past 15 years. Mentoring is my greatest professional passion outside working with students.

My favorite mentoring quote: “Education is the only profession that eats its young.”

That says it all.

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Maureen, very simple. THEY’RE USING VALUE ADDED MEASURES. USING LOW BID MINIMUM COMPETENCY TESTS. REAL teachers are trying to provide kids a real education. TFAers have been taught in five weeks to teach the simplest of simple things on extremely limited tests that measure (poorly) only the tiniest part of education. The research is STARKLY clear that the data from value-added using these tests contains enormous error components. VAM is appealing to you and others (the politicians) who know nothing about measurement because it LOOKS like we’re measuring something. VAM – and the tests we use – are nothing more than a very rusty old spring scale. We don’t have the precision balance scale, and no one should delude themelves into thinking the piece of junk out of the trash bin will work like one. @Peter S, you should also consider that by and large you’re taking TFA caliber kids (UGA is VERY selective) AND providing them tremendous value-added (sorry, the term is appropriate). Few if any of the other ed schools in the state attract the caliber of kids you get. Maureen has a point that has been argued by a number of others: How do we change the culture (Finland has been the recent exemplar, however appropriate that might or might not be) such that teachers are extremely highly valued (and compensated) so that those very bright kids take your five years’ rather than five weeks’ preparation?

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I’ve still got student work to grade for this semester, so don’t want to get too bogged down in this interesting discussion…Maureen wonders if it’s the prerogative of faculty at selective universities to call out colleagues at less-selective universities, and I’m sure I’m not the only one who’s reluctant to do so, and for a variety of reasons:

1. Often the regional universities hire their faculty from the state’s research universities, which would mean that we’d be calling out our own graduates. Given that we tend to be as proud of our Ph.D. grads as we are of our undergrads and master’s students, we aren’t likely to start treating them as if they’re idiots because they chose to teach in regional universities instead of selective universities. Typically it’s their desire to be wholehearted teacher educators, rather than to split their time between research and teacher education, that influences this decision.

2. Unless their research involves comparing regional and flagship universities, UGA professors and their kind usually don’t know enough about what’s actually happening at regional universities to criticize them publicly. Usually we’re too busy with our own teaching, research, and service responsibilities to know the details of the work performance of faculty from other universities.

3. Most of us at UGA are aware, as some have pointed out and as I have acknowledged, that we teach in a selective environment. We are not about to claim superiority because our students made our admissions cut, and because UGA’s research mission provides us with different teaching conditions. I think we’re sympathetic enough to our regional university colleagues that we understand the ways in which our privileged status undoubtedly contributes to the success of our graduates, rather than entirely attributing the effectiveness of our graduates solely to our greater teaching ability.

OK, back to grading student work.

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Yes, Diane Ravitch–

Thank you for your post.

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The columnist Walter E. Williams nails it:

“Students who have chosen education as their major have the lowest SAT scores of any other major. Students who have an education degree earn lower scores than any other major on graduate school admission tests such as the GRE, MCAT or LSAT. Schools of education, either graduate or undergraduate, represent the academic slums of most any university. They are home to the least able students and professors. Schools of education should be shut down.”

Wow. (Read the whole thing at http://tiny.cc/6yuxr )

If you take a close look at some of the APS administrators and staff members who are most responsible for building this house of cards (now in mid-collapse), they are from these same academic slums.

Pants on the ground!

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@ Christie,

Why would a teacher want to have a college freshman in her/his classroom and mess it up? How can we sacrifice our children for the sake of college students (or anyone else) who are learning to become teachers?

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From the article posted by Killebrew:

“Studies indicate that students of novice Teach for America teachers perform significantly less well in reading and math than those of credentialed beginning teachers”

DUH!! You can’t get a “boot camp” prepared teacher ready for teaching reading or math. I spent two years working on my master’s in reading, and I had coursework that dug deep. I am certified to teach reading only after obtaining that degree and passing the GACE. I work one-on-one with kids and have the skills to do so. You don’t get that from a “boot camp survivor”

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@Shamus, The practicums I’m talking about are typically only for 100 hours per semester. During this time, the teacher candidate is observing and assisting as the teacher sees fit. I know when I did my practicums prior to full-time student teaching, my teachers were grateful to have the classroom help, especially during small-group work. I was able to circulate the room and assist individual students while the teacher concentrated on the small group. ::shrug:: your mileage may vary.

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I wonder how much practicum teacher candidates in those high achiving countries (Singapore, Japan, Finland, etc.) actually complete. I also wonder what kinds of and how much on-going professional development opportunites those countries make available to (or require from) teachers.

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I completed a graduate program in education this past summer. The degree was officially titled a Master’s in the Arts of Teaching (How this is distinct from a Master’s in Education, I do not know). It focused on Urban schools and teaching in challenging environments. I can say, without a doubt, that I was unimpressed by the caliber of students I found in my graduate classes. Even though I graduated from the same institution and had a similar undergraduate degree as most of my fellow grads, I noticed a distinct aversion to critical thought, originality, and effort among my peers. In other words, they were average but we have to live with that or reduce our new teacher population to UGA graduates.

Part of the program required us to take graduate level courses in the subject we were seeking certification for. As a group, we education students underperformed the students pursuing that subject academically. They often groaned when we introduced ourselves as students from the college of education. Our reputation was one of insipidity.

The education courses were not necessarily easy. I want to make that clear. We had to read. A lot. We wrote numerous essays and position papers. There was no thesis but the portfolios required for graduation totaled more than 200 pages of content we created. We had to make power point presentations. Sometimes we had to create “podcasts” and “digital inquiries”. I’m not sure how that helped me in the long run as the school I ended up in was exactly the kind of school I was being prepared for: Title I; students had no internet access at home, no iPods, no smart phones, five projectors for the whole school, and the school computers couldn’t play any audio/video anyway. The gist of it is, we did plenty of work but the work was of questionable value. All the while, projects from my peers seemed identical. All the while, they never stopped complaining about how much work they were doing.

One bright spot of my teacher training program was Practicum; although, I should note that I was chastised for teaching too many classes ahead of schedule (you have to wait until week 10 before teaching three periods). I spent a full school year in one classroom. My students and I developed a strong rapport and we came to respect each other. I really got to “play teacher”. Over the summer I learned from my mentor teacher that the students I taught (5 of seven periods were entirely mine and in the other two I acted more like an assistant) performed just as well on the EOCT as their peers. A lukewarm victory to say the least but I didn’t hold them back. I also attended classes to ways to connect my graduate learning to my classroom experiences. There are very few. I found that my “core curriculum” of education courses was largely useless.

Here are some classes I did find valuable:

Educational Psychology – Learning that we have many (sometimes conflicting) ideas about how learning works helps put perspective behind lesson plans. Also, we learn new things about the brain every day. It takes time to get those into the classroom. There is not one right way to teach! It depends largely on the students’ needs.

Social Foundations of Education – All teachers need to be radicals. I don’t care what kind or who for. A class examining the reasons behind our failing schools ought to be mandatory (they weren’t for me and our core classes ignored these issues almost entirely). If you want to set foot in urban schools and know nothing about the roots of urban poverty and illiteracy, you are doomed from the start.

Philosophy of Education – Largely similar to the reasons for Social Foundations but more ethics and less history. Again, teachers need to think critically about their jobs, schools, and institutions.

Educational Research – I’m not talking about the kind of research teachers are required to do in class. I’m talking about a course that makes teachers literate consumers of educational researcher. This requires some knowledge of statistics too! Q: How come mailing books to low-income families didn’t improve literacy rates? A: Because someone in policy didn’t know how to read research.

Any content area related classes – Teachers should be something like experts in their fields. If you want to teach science, you need to have more then just some introduction to bio., chem., physics., etc. classes. I don’t think it is unreasonable to expect our teachers to have an understanding of a subject equivalent to that provided by an undergraduate degree in that subject (some concessions made for elementary teachers and cross subject area teacher of course).

Lastly, teachers complain too much (ironic, I know). We don’t have easy jobs. We don’t get paid much. We’re often blamed for things beyond our control. But, teachers need to suck it up. We are in schools for a reason. We aren’t here for the money or the recognition. We’re here for the students.

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Whether it be a TFA, alternative certification program, or traditional education program- an effective teacher is an effective teacher as demonstrated by their committment and overall classroom performance. As an educator, I have been told I was too smart to be a teacher- get that! I would need to see more data before I high fived their results. Educators are just too damn expensive and any excuse at this point is good enough for bureaucrats to get the ball rolling in a direction they desire. The goal is to dismantle the education profession, and treat is as a service opportunity in exchange for nullified student loans. It is becoming the equivalent of a peace corps style profession.
The fact that a revolving door would exist is of little concern to bureaucrats, as long as the overhead costs (teacher salaries) remain low- it’s all good.

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“He asked what my major was and when I told him, he looked around for a minute and then said, “A lot of dumb people go into education because they think they only have to outsmart 6 or 7 yr olds”

This is a comment a professor made this past semester to young lady who graduated from the high school where I teach. She plans to major in special education for high-needs students. She was in the top third of her class, is extremely bright, and the first person in her family to attend college.

And we wonder why our best and brightest don’t go into education????

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One of the main problems with education in Georgia is that most of the teachers are native Georgians. As a veteran teacher from a northern state, I’ve been shocked by the ignorance and poor verbal skills of the teachers here. Even in Gwinnett, I cringe when I hear teachers say things like,… “My class did real good on the test.” Not all teachers of course, as I’ve met some very effective educators, but in general I would worry about exactly WHAT these educators were teaching my child!

Teach For America jobs are non-existent in states with excellent school systems. Georgia’s only hope is to import teachers and administrators from the Midwest or the North. No more promoting from within this state (of despair!)

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This is why we need to get rid of public education and simply replace the system with vouchers. “Teachers” in public schools, from public universities can’t even get their kids to score well on public school standardized tests. These are the same tests that everyone knows are so easy and that most public school teachers have their students cheat on.

Maybe if we had all teachers trained by private school institutions of education, they would be better. Vanderbilt was mentioned, but I also think that we should include other private and more accessible schools such as The University of Phoenix, Full Sail University, Devry, etc. Let’s face it folks; public education gets the dregs. If we ran education like a business, this would never happen. I am so sick of teachers claiming that they can’t get the job done because of this reason or that. This study shows that if you pull someone out of the real world then they can teach in a real world setting.

Maureen is right. Most teachers in public universities are lacking. All teachers should be from the work force or at the very least, they should be from private universities where a better education for teachers takes place. If Waiting for Superman didn’t spell it out completely then you “teachers” of the world should wake up. The former dean of Columbia Teacher’s College may have said something profound, but I think the current dean states in best:

“Let’s get to work!” Thomas James Provost Teachers College, Columbia University

If you get the smartest candidates, you know that they will present the material better than someone who scored lower on the SAT.

Sincerely,
Caelia

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Experience is a factor. Any adult who has children or other experiences in different work settings, would fair differently than a first year 20-something 1st year teacher with no other experience. Is it fair to compare apples and oranges and present these findings as if they are game changers? I suppose it depends on how desperate one is to push their own economically motivated agenda. I have a friend who was interested in switching her career over to education. I explained she would be better off where she is as they would more than likely not allow her to make 4 years- no matter how good she might be.

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FYI…In APS, the TFA teachers usually are given the best and the brightest while the experienced teachers have the low level students. NO COMPARISON!!!

Joe Martin for APS superintendent!!!

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TFA attracts bright and motivated young people, no question about that. That goes a long way in the short run, even when thrown into challenging classsrooms with little support. Two things to worry about however wtih the value-added scores. First, for individual teachers the results can vary significantly from year to year. Second, most teachers (even ones recruited by TFA) only master their craft after 5-7 seven years in the profession, well after most TFA candidates leave teaching. If we want to scale up alternative routes to teaching fine, but we need strategies that retain the best long enough for them to get really good at what they do. We don’t even let physicians practice independently prior to a 3+ year residency. What’s so different about teaching?

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