Policymakers are still looking for the right way to identify effective teacher preparation programs and predict who will be an effective teacher. Nothing tried so far can guarantee effective teachers.
In No Guarantees, Bellwether recommends an alternative approach that relies on the best available evidence for predicting future teacher effectiveness: initial teaching effectiveness.
Instead of layering on additional requirements, Bellwether recommends that policymakers roll back burdensome and ineffective teaching requirements, rethink licensure, create systems to make preparation-pathway data accessible to the public, and create the conditions for alternative pathways to teaching. They propose four strategies for ensuring that schools and students have access to the best teachers possible (described in detail below):
- Make it less risky to try teaching
In the current preparation system, becoming a teacher is laden with risk. States force candidates to spend thousands of hours and tens of thousands of dollars on fulfilling requirements that won’t help them become effective teachers. When a candidate finally begins teaching, she’ll waste more time on questionable professional development. If she wants a salary increase, she’ll pay for, and sit through, graduate coursework to earn an advanced degree that won’t likely help her improve her practice. And these are just the risks associated with teacher training — there is also the challenging and high-stakes work, the general low pay, and the lack of advancement opportunities that come with teaching itself. The result is a profession in which potential candidates’ actual out-of-pocket and opportunity costs are extremely high.
There are a number of ways to reduce the risks associated with teaching and make the profession more appealing. Reducing barriers to entry is one place to start.
- Give schools and districts, not preparation programs, responsibility for recommending a candidate for licensure, and require that recommendation to be based on a track record of effectiveness
In the current system, once a candidate meets state requirements, her teacher preparation program recommends her for licensure. This is a flawed arrangement. Most preparation programs make recommendations on the basis of the completer’s academic performance and a limited amount of (often under-supervised) student teaching experience. But, as noted above, there’s no guarantee that these experiences create a teacher who is prepared to be effective on Day One. Moreover, the current system encourages schools to treat all licensed teachers as interchangeable once they enter the classroom, with identical workloads, evaluation systems, and development opportunities.
A better system would base licensure on actual candidate performance.
- Measure and publicize results
States are the only entities that could have enough data to objectively assess candidate performance, placement, and retention. Candidates will never have this information unless the states collect and provide it. Districts will never see beyond their own hiring practices unless their state collects information from all schools and aggregates the results.
In the world we envision, states would do a much better job of collecting and reporting on this information. They would collect and publish program-level data on teacher effectiveness, retention, placement, and years to licensure. And they would invest substantial time and effort in making the data accessible to the public.
- Unpack the black box of good teaching
We don’t yet know how to identify or train good teachers. To make matters worse, as a field we recklessly embrace faddish “best practices,” whether or not there’s research to back them up. When a new idea comes along, it’s reasonable to first try it on a small scale, measure the results, and then scale it up only if the research says it’s effective. But that’s not what states have done with teacher preparation. A number of ineffective requirements — from higher minimum GPAs to more clinical coursework hours to better teacher-performance assessments — started off as good ideas that states and programs codified as policy before the ideas were tested.
Instead, states, the federal government, and private philanthropy organizations should invest strategically in research on what makes a good teacher, and only then use that research to make policy.
For more information, see http://bellwethereducation.org/sites/default/files/Bellwether_NoGuarantees_Final.pdf
