RALEIGH — One of the most daunting tasks school administrators face is finding the highly qualified teachers they need to staff schools under the No Child Left Behind education act. The emphasis on teacher preparedness is understandable, given the high-stakes tests that now measure students and schools under the law.

According to the Department of Public Instruction, North Carolina needs nearly 12,000 new teachers annually. Swelling school enrollments and attrition by retirement, plus class-size reductions, add to the demand. In North Carolina we are now importing teachers from states all over the United States, so teacher preparation standards in other states may have an impact on how our students perform.

In a new international study, “Preparing Teachers Around the World” published by the Educational Testing Service, researchers compared the United States to countries that require high-stakes milestones as part of the teacher preparation and development process. The countries studied all outperformed the United States on eighth-grade science tests in the “Repeat of the Third International Mathematics and Science Study of 1999.” Although the authors stop short of recommending policy, the study raises provocative questions. Are better teachers the product of more rigorous, high-stakes teacher preparation processes?

Certification may not be enough to produce a highly qualified teacher. In the United States, schools rely heavily on the certification stage in the teacher-preparation process. That is especially true in North Carolina. To date, North Carolina has the largest percentage of nationally certified teachers in the country. According to a North Carolina Education Alliance study, more than 20 percent of the 16,000 National Board for Professional Teaching Standards certified teachers are located in our state.

North Carolina student scores on national tests like the Scholastic Aptitude Test and the National Assessment of Educational Progress have shown improvement over time, but state education officials acknowledge that the state needs to continue its efforts. “We are making progress, but we need to keep going if we want to be number one in the nation,” Gov. Mike Easley said at a recent education press conference. Just two school districts in the state, Hyde and Ashe, met district-level adequate yearly progress requirements under No Child Left Behind for 2002-03.

A recently released Education Week study, “Quality Counts 2003,” rated states according to their efforts to improve teacher quality. Overall, North Carolina made a fifth-place showing, and received a score of 84 — a B — for a combination of points earned for required teacher training classes, state licencing and financial incentives, and for several state accountability requirements.

Although North Carolina scored above most states in the Education Week study, it is typical of all U.S. teacher education in one significant respect. The main filter, or point in the teacher preparation pipeline that would force an individual to exit the teaching profession, occurs at the certification stage. Before and after this point, most steps can be considered low-stakes, according to the 2003 Educational Testing Service report “Preparing Teachers Around the World.”

“Preparing Teachers Around the World” used an eight-stage teacher training and development model. The sequence of stages form a “pipeline,” and teacher candidates can progress to later stages only by completing earlier ones.
At each stage, policies present pressure points, or “filters” for the developing teacher. The rigor of the required step determines how difficult it is to pass through that stage. This study assumes that high- quality teachers will go through most or all filters.

The high-stakes pressure points could cause a person to exit the profession, while medium-stakes points can only be passed with some effort. Low-or-no-stakes filters are not real barriers. Instead, they present mainly “pro-forma” requirements.

The pipeline begins with acceptance into a teacher training program, and proceeds through practical experience, exit from teacher training, certification, hiring, evaluation during an initial teaching period, evaluation of professional development, and evaluation for tenure.

Fourteen of the 38 countries that participated in the “Repeat of the Third International Mathematics and Science Study of 1999” were candidates for the international “Preparing Teachers” study. Of these, seven also had an integrated eighth-grade science curriculum, needed for the comparison.

The seven nations that ETS finally chose were Australia, England, Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, the Netherlands, and Singapore.

The report focused on “top performers” to see what differences and similarities they have to U.S. practices. The ETS study claims to be unique in that it looks at the entire teacher preparation pipeline, and not exclusively at a single point along the way.

The “Preparing Teachers” study offers some revealing comparisons. Authors Wang, Coley, Coleman, and Phelps found that all of the countries studied used more filters for teacher training and development than did the United States. Technically, we have the same stages in the process as every other country, but we don’t use most of the stages to filter out low-quality teachers and candidates. “In the United States, nearly all of the high-stakes filtering is applied before or during initial certification. After that, the filters in place might be considered ‘proforma.’”

Eight pressure points, or “filters” show where in the process countries exert restrictions. Some countries “front-load” the process, as in Japan, Korea, the Netherlands, and Singapore. The screening process for education school entry is significant in these places. Japan also “back-loads” the pipeline, with high-stakes consequences attached to professional development and tenuring. Japan uses more high-and medium-stakes filters than any other country studied —four and two, respectively — and only two low-stakes criteria. Following Japan in order of the combined number of high-and-medium-stakes filters are Korea, Singapore, Australia, the Netherlands, Hong Kong, England, and, last, the United States.

Teacher preparation in the United States involves just one high-stakes barrier: teacher certification. Most U.S. teacher development stages are no-or-low-stakes filters — five out of eight requirements in the U.S. are low-stakes, proforma measures.

If high-stakes tests improve student achievement, can high-stakes filters raise teacher quality? “Preparing Teachers Around the World” doesn’t tackle this directly, but the study is suggestive. Even so, the authors offer “some words of caution, along with a few caveats.” We are fairly warned that correlation and causation are not the same thing.

Rather than suggest that another county’s model will work in the United States, the authors point out that the number and placement of high-stakes filters can be a valuable policy tool in the quest for teacher quality.
Palasek is an assistant editor at Carolina Journal and a policy analyst for the North Carolina Education Alliance.