Analysts Chad Aldeman, Kevin Carey, Erin Dillon, Ben Miller, and Elena Silva of Education Sector examine the way the United States currently prepares teachers and offer some specific suggestions on how to improve it.
Over the next five years, more than a million new teachers will enter public school classrooms. Analysts from Education Sector claim that the system in place to produce these teachers-supported by an ever-expanding set of federal financial aid programs and multimillion-dollar federal grants-offers no guarantees of quality for anyone involved, from the college students who often borrow thousands of dollars to attend teacher preparation programs to the districts, schools, and children that depend on good teachers.
In this brief, the authors propose a three-part strategy to improve teacher preparation:
- Create a new federal framework for assessing and improving teacher preparation programs, one that “encourages accurate and honest reporting on outcomes-based indicators of quality.”
- Establish a new set of competitive grants to encourage states and institutions to “make ambitious changes to how, and how rigorously, they monitor, evaluate, and improve their teacher preparation programs.” Under current law, the authors note, states have the responsibility to hold their institutions accountable, but do not have the corresponding capacity or incentive to do so.
- Develop a new strategy to streamline existing financial aid programs and better align those programs with current efforts to improve the quality of the teacher work force. The authors suggest that “this should involve eliminating TEACH Grants, an ineffective pre-service grant program, and using those resources to expand debt forgiveness benefits for high-quality classroom teachers.
These strategies emphasize the federal role in improvement of teacher preparation. Clearly, the Department of Education is of the same mind. In President Obama’s proposed 2012 budget, released yesterday, funding for many of these ideas has been requested.
For information on the Department of Education proposed budget, see http://www2.ed.gov/about/overview/budget/budget12/index.html
For the Education Sector brief, see http://www.educationsector.org/sites/default/files/publications/TeacherPrep_Brief_RELEASE_0.pdf
