A recent Congressional hearing has weighed how Congress should improve teacher preparation, and while the improvements may be necessary, they certainly won’t come easily.
One of the big questions facing lawmakers: Should the federal government call for colleges of education to track their graduates into the classroom? And, if so, what exactly should that look like? Already, states are required to identify teacher preparation programs that aren’t up to snuff and help them improve. But states aren’t exactly knocking themselves out to fulfill that requirement, noted Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, the chairman of the Senate education committee, at Tuesday’s hearing. As of 2013, nearly half the states and the District of Columbia hadn’t pointed to a single low-performing program, he said.
It seems that the holy grail of successful tracking of teacher preparation programs would be some method to follow teachers into the classroom after they have finished their teacher prep programs. In other words, most education policy experts and key Congressmen such as Senator Lamar Alexander (R. Tenn), the top Republican on the Senate Education Committee, agree that if there was some means to see how well teachers perform in their first, say, five years of teaching, then there would be more concrete ways to verify the success or failure of teacher preparation programs.
At the committee hearings, alternative teaching preparation program TNTP was singled out for praise for the way that they follow their teachers into the classroom and continue to help with their development even after “graduation”. But even TNTP president Tim Daly acknowledges that this is not going to be practical for every program, in part because many teachers end up teaching outside the state or district of their training. And the great diversity of teacher preparation programs, schools, and methods of gauging teacher success are constant wrenches in whatever system Congress will end up codifying into law.
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