In a previous post, I outlined the current landscape of teacher policy in Ohio and pointed out some areas in need of significant reform. The largest problem—and perhaps the most intractable—is teacher preparation. Despite consensus on the need for reform, some solid ideas, and an abundance of opportunities over the last few decades, schools of education have changed very little. Ohio is no exception, and many of the Buckeye State’s teacher preparation programs are in need of an overhaul. Here are a few recommendations for how policy makers and preparation programs in Ohio can start making progress in the impervious-to-change area of teacher training.
Rethink ways of holding teacher preparation programs accountable
Uncle Ben may not have been thinking of education when he said, “With great power comes great responsibility,” but the shoe certainly fits. Teachers have an enormous impact on their students, and it makes sense that taxpayers, parents, and policy makers would want to ensure that the programs entrusted with training those teachers are accountable for their performance. Ohio leaders recognize this and have already taken some tentative steps toward judging teacher preparation programs on the performance of their graduates. Unfortunately, those steps may not be headed in the right direction. In my previous post, I explained some of the drawbacks of the Ohio Department of Higher Education’s yearly performance reports that publicize data on Ohio’s traditional teacher preparation programs. While the reports are a great step forward in transparency, too many of the measures used—student learning objectives (SLOs), licensure test scores, the number of candidate field hours and a vague “satisfactory” rating for completion—aren’t effective at differentiating the great teachers from the not-so-great ones.
Finding better measures isn’t going to be easy. Two new reports (here and here) from Bellwether question whether it’s even possible to determine the effectiveness of teacher preparation programs. Bellwether’s work makes clear that the inputs many states use—admission standards, course content, teaching practice, and exam scores—often do not determine a teacher’s future effectiveness. A potential solution is to measure outputs instead—the effectiveness of program completers once they’re in the field. It’s an idea akin to school accountability in the K–12 arena: Give teacher preparation programs the freedom to design, select, and train as they see fit, and then hold them accountable for the results. Unfortunately, there’s conflicting research there too—especially for states that judge outputs based on teacher evaluation systems that typically rate all teachers the same. Ohio is one of those states (90 percent of teachers were rated in the top two categories in 2015), and finding solid measures for both differentiating teachers and linking them back to their preparation programs promises to be a heavy lift.
Rather than rushing to grade teacher preparation programs using data from the state’s required teacher evaluation systems, policy makers should fund and review high-quality research that examines how best to differentiate teachers. They should revamp the state’s teacher evaluation system into one that truly differentiates teachers and determine if those lessons can be applied to teacher preparation programs. They should examine the programs that received high rankings from NCTQ on their last teacher preparation report (here and here) and pilot parts of those models in Ohio preparation programs. They should also look to states like Massachusetts, which have taken a thoughtful but strong stance in this realm. While accountability for teacher preparation programs is important—and should eventually be a real, measurable component of the sector that considers both inputs and outputs—the Buckeye State must avoid rushing into labels and consequences until it makes certain that it is effectively differentiating teachers.
Empower K–12 schools to establish and influence teacher training grounds
It’s going to take time and careful consideration to change teacher preparation programs, but there are thousands of kids who can’t afford to wait for the right system to finally fall into place. What can be done in the meantime?
A recent case study from the Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation examines how a few highly successful charter schools (High Tech High in San Diego; Uncommon Schools, KIPP, and Achievement First in New York; and Match Education in Boston) have created their own teacher certification and master’s degree programs. Each of these schools began their foray into teacher credentialing because they had trouble finding teachers whose “philosophies and methods” aligned with their own missions. In addition, they found that many of the teachers they hired lacked the skills to be immediately successful in the classroom. By creating their own teacher training programs, these schools were able to connect formal teacher education with what happens in actual classrooms. Though each program develops teachers based on its parent school’s mission, philosophy, and favored instructional methods, each one also includes a performance-based graduation requirement. As a result, these programs function like competency-based models.
Ohio’s charter school sector doesn’t have the best reputation, so it’s understandable that folks might shy away from allowing charters to train teachers. But as with other forms of education innovation, teacher training doesn’t have to copy and paste models without making adjustments—and charters don’t have to be the only ones taking part in innovation. The Cleveland Metropolitan School District has already done something similar with principal training through its Aspiring Principals Academy (APA), a program that was established in partnership with New York City’s Aspiring Principals Program. A recent report from Education First examined partnerships between school districts and preparation programs and offered recommendations for how to shape teacher pipelines through collaboration. Schools in Ohio—district and charter alike, perhaps through city-based reform groups—could even band together to create programs that serve both types of schools. The organizations highlighted in the case study did experience obstacles, but Ohio stakeholders could preemptively address these by creating a pathway for state licensure and accreditation approval and by helping (or even providing) revenue and cost structures that would allow for sustainable models.
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The bottom line when it comes to teacher preparation is that everyone deserves better—the kids who must be taught, the candidates who choose to make teaching their profession, and the taxpayers who expect their schools to be staffed with well-trained, effective educators. Teaching is a complex and difficult job. Teacher training needs to change if it’s going to prepare candidates to deliver what real schools and kids will need, but that’s only part of the challenge. Stay tuned for a future deep-dive into the complexity of teacher preparation programs’ admission standards, state licensure requirements, and recruiting the best and brightest students to be teachers.
