We might “want to rethink our entire way” of teacher education, declared University of North Carolina vice president of academic affairs Alan Mabe at the April 8 meeting of the university’s Board of Governors. He was responding to a new study from the UNC System titled “The Impact of Teacher Preparation on Student Learning in North Carolina Public Schools.”
When Erskine Bowles became president of the UNC system, he, too, pointed at K-12 education as such a major problem that he made its improvement his No. 1 priority. To that end, he commissioned UNC’s Carolina Institute for Public Policy to conduct the study. It was intended to identify the best teachers, and the best education schools, in the hope that this information would shed light on the best practices.
The lead researchers, UNC-Chapel Hill public policy professor (and head of the Institute for Public Policy) Gary Henry and East Carolina University education professor Charles Thompson, and their staff examined North Carolina students’ incremental performances on standardized tests to see how much knowledge they gained in a specific year. They then matched the students with their teachers to determine the teachers’ effect. Statistical techniques were used to remove the impact of such extraneous influences as students’ prior achievement levels, their family incomes, teachers’ pre-college preparation, and so on.
Foremost among the study’s findings is the superior performance by the 310 participants in the Teach for America program. The program trains and places recent college graduates with non-education degrees in classrooms in low-income areas.
The study showed that in five of nine measurable categories — overall high school, high school math, high school English, high school science, and middle school math, students with Teach for America teachers significantly outperformed students with UNC-trained teachers.
In high school social studies, middle school science, elementary school ready and elementary math, their performance roughly equaled their UNC-trained peers. (In the other two categories, middle school algebra and science, there were not enough Teach for America participants to yield significant results).
In some cases, the Teach for America participants’ results were quite dramatic. For instance, middle school math students with Teach for America teachers tested as if they had an additional 90 days of instruction — when the entire school year is only 180 days of instruction.
One reason cited for the exceptional performance of Teach for America participants, who receive only six weeks of education training before entering the classroom, is the fact that they are an elite group academically, generally selected from the most prestigious colleges. For example, for three straight years, Teach for America has been the top employer of Duke University graduates.
Henry suggested another reason for the success of Teach for America participants: Their training is geared specifically to the grade levels and course material they will be teaching. Other first-year teachers frequently do their student teaching and prepare for grades other than the ones they finally teach.
A third possible explanation is that the Teach for America participants excelled primarily at the high school and junior high levels, where the classes are subject-specific. Since they most likely teach subjects closely aligned to their college majors, perhaps the fact that they studied the subject matter intensively makes up for their lack of teacher preparation.
Some of the study’s findings were anticipated fully, such as the revelation that inexperienced teachers perform poorly on average — it takes approximately five years before they completely are up to speed. Also, teachers teaching subjects other than the ones that they were trained to teach perform at subpar levels.
One major surprise was the relatively weak performance by “lateral entry” teachers. Lateral entry permits people with non-education degrees to be hired as teachers, as long as they work toward getting their teacher certification within three years. Henry said that the initial expectations for lateral entry were very high, that “we’d be getting NASA engineers looking for career changes to teach science and math.”
Instead, he said that more frequently lateral entry teachers have majors such as business or psychology, and that they tend to come from the local communities. Lateral entry teachers performed worse than UNC-trained counterparts in two of the 11 categories.
The dominant performance by Teach for America participants — with minimal training — appears to support Mabe’s contention that the entire discipline of teacher education as it is conducted today must be questioned.
Jay Schalin is senior writer for the Pope Center for Higher Education Policy (popecenter.org) and a contributor to Carolina Journal.