Teacher prep chaos

Education Week says a new National Research Council report shows that the best available data indicates teachers who get certified through alternative programs do just as well as teachers who come from the traditional education school route.

However, the report says a lot more, and it is pretty disturbing. The main reason there are no differences in teachers from different certification routes is that very little is really known about how to best train teachers.

Imagine that - despite years of focus on education reform around the nation, the report indicates that credible research about what works in teacher preparation remains very thin. Basically, all those ed school types are being guided by hunches and guesses, not thoughtful research, because there isn’t much thoughtful research.



Anyway, the chaotic lack of knowledge about how to effectively prepare teachers really isn’t news. We have written before about the same issues, including discussing very forthright comments from Arthur Levine, the former president of Columbia Teachers College in New York City. Levine has been decrying the lousy research on teacher preparation for years. He sounds off again in the Education Week article.

But, nothing seems to be changing.

So, somehow, as I read the Education Week article, I can’t help recalling a quote from Kentucky Board of Education Chair Joe Brothers:

“I came on the local (school) board in 1987. What you just said to me is no different than what I heard in 1987. So why should I be hopeful?”

(Comment made at the October 8, 2009 Kentucky Board of Education Meeting in Frankfort, Kentucky after department of education staff briefed on still more fad ideas about how to fix our education system. An audiovisual recording of this meeting is on line).

One last point: There is an interesting quote in the Education Week article with a Kentucky connection:

“The research we have on teacher education isn’t up to answering some of the most basic questions that people would like to have answers to,” said panel member Andrew C. Porter, the dean of the University of Pennsylvania’s graduate school of education. “We don’t want to be in the same position 10 years from now.”

Porter was a member of Kentucky’s National Technical Advisory Panel on Assessment and Accountability for many years. That panel was supposed to help make the CATS assessments really functional and valuable.

CATS is now dead, of course, and we never got credible data on teacher performance from it. CATS was never, “up to answering some of the most basic questions that people would like to have answers to.” But, I don’t recall Porter ever pointing that out.