The New Teacher Project’s recent study indicating that billions of dollars are largely wasted on ineffective professional development has raised a question central to all of our reform efforts: How do we make teachers better?
This new brief from the RAND Corporation, representing the preliminary observations of their ongoing assessment of the Leading Educators Fellowship program, attacks that question from the angle of mentoring and teacher leadership. Leading Educators is a national nonprofit that selects and develops exceptional mid-career teachers, training them to act as guides for their less experienced peers and spearhead improvement efforts in their schools. Its specific aims are to inculcate leadership skills among participants in the two-year fellowship, boost the achievement of students taught by both fellows and their mentees, and increase teacher retention in high-need schools. The organization’s own characterization of the study asserts that the program has now graduated over three hundred fellows. That cohort has mentored approximately 2,500 teachers, affecting by extension some sixty-nine thousand students in New Orleans, Memphis, Kansas City, and Washington, D.C.
The report compared program participants (both fellows and mentee teachers) to people who had applied and been rejected, as well as other teachers deemed similar by dint of personal characteristics and instructional effectiveness from the year prior. Following three years of study in Louisiana and Missouri, RAND described the fellowship’s early results as “promising but mixed” in the realm of student achievement. For the fellows themselves, the only consistently measured impact was a bump in effectiveness for Louisiana math teachers—and even this discovery is inherently limited by its tiny sample size. Mentee teachers provided a more robust data set, as well as the most positive news: Math and social studies teachers in the Pelican State both raised student performance, though their colleagues in science and reading produced no such improvement. This sunny finding remains provisional, however, and the report notes that “while our results indicate that it is possible that mentees in Louisiana are benefiting from their exposure to the program, additional evidence is needed to confirm this pattern.”
The verdict is still out on teacher retention, however. The authors concede that they “failed to identify any consistent positive or negative effect of the program on participating mentee teachers.” Overall, these early findings provide only modest inklings of what the fellowship might accomplish, and given the vast numbers of students and teachers involved, RAND is correct in cautioning its readers against interpreting too much in the early goings. Mentoring holds great potential for fortifying the academic cultures of individual schools and establishing pipelines for leadership, but it remains one weapon in the battle to improve teacher quality.
SOURCE: Kata Mihaly, Benjamin Master, and Cate Yoon, “Examining the Early Impacts of the Leading Educators Fellowship on Student Achievement and Teacher Retention,” RAND Corporation (2015).
