New York City, especially under Mayor Michael Bloomberg, has often tried to be a model of a progressive city, willing to take on business lobbies or entrenched bureaucracies in an effort to improve. For example, recently, New York started using data to rate restaurants, track the repair of potholes and close lackluster schools in New York City.
The next in line is teacher colleges.
12 teacher-preparation schools in New York City are being given grades on such aspects as “how many graduates are certified in high-needs areas like special education and whether their teachers have been able to increase student test scores.”
This effort in New York City is part of a larger movement, which we blogged about here, to address what many feel are spotty teacher preparation programs.
The major positive of the plan in New York City, one that Education Secretary Arne Duncan has publicly acknowledged, is that it seeks to bring more accountability to a system that is quite diverse and difficult to evaluate. As a result, graduates of these programs have mixed results in the classroom, and that is if it is possible to track new teachers from teacher preparation programs. In years past, these figures have often not been available.
Ironically, the commendable attempt to bring accountability to a heterogeneous system is also the weakness of the plan. Some of the ways in which the data have been reported do not take into account unique aspects of different teacher preparation programs, yet the programs are still being evaluated against each other. For example, the Teachers College at Columbia University has many more students from all over the country than do more local programs such as Queens College or St. John’s University. Yet, Columbia comes out looking bad in the released data because only 72 percent of students from Teachers College still worked in the system three years later whereas more than 90 percent of recent graduates of Queens College and St. John’s University, for instance, were still working as teachers after three years.
Overall, the report addresses 6 areas:
- the number of teachers that were placed in low-performing schools
- the number of teachers certified in areas with high demand, like math, science, special education and English as a second language
- whether recent hires were denied tenure
- whether recent hires received an unsatisfactory rating from principals
- whether the students of recent hires improved on state tests in reading and math
- the number of teachers still working as teachers in the same location 3 years later
For more information, please visit: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/15/nyregion/new-york-issuing-scorecards-on-teacher-colleges.html?ref=javierchernandez&_r=0
