On
Friday, April 25, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan announced a plan to
evaluate teacher training programs. (See Motoko Rich’s article from the New
York Times here
or Stephanie Simon’s report in Politico here.)
According
to Politico:
The Obama
administration plans to use tens of millions in federal financial aid as
leverage to reward teacher training programs that produce teachers who
routinely raise test scores—and to drive the rest out of business…
The goal: To
ensure that every state evaluates its teacher education programs by several key
metrics, such as how many graduates land teaching jobs, how long they stay in
the profession and whether they boost their students’ scores on standardized
tests. The administration will then steer financial aid, including nearly $100
million a year in federal grants to aspiring teachers, to those programs that
score the highest. The rest, Duncan said, will need to improve or “go out of
business.”
In an e-mail
exchange, Diane Ravitch asked me if I could write something for her blog
on this plan, and I did. I reprint it here.
The six questions
I pose are based on a much longer series I wrote on the current discussion
surrounding teacher education. I posted that series on this blog in late
2013-early 2014, and you can access them here,
here,
and here.
If this issue of teacher recruitment and education is of particular interest to
you, you might also like two other posts from 2013: “Reflections
on Harriet Ball, Teaching, and Teacher Education” (Aug 21, 2013) and “Forever
Young: The New Teaching Career” (Sept 13, 2013).
Here are my six
questions for Secretary Duncan:
1. Will
you be evaluating with the same metrics all teacher preparation programs,
alternative as well as traditional, Teach for America as well as California
State University at Northridge or UCLA?
2. If
the Department of Education will use close to $100 million per year on grants
to forward its agenda, where will that money come from? From other educational
programs that serve needy populations? If so, what services or funding will be
cut or discontinued because of this reallocation?
3. Policy
formation emerges out of staff research, consultation with experts, and
political deliberation. What research and consultation leads you to the current
project? I ask because your statement about teacher preparation programs
needing to improve “or go out of business” as well as your general approach
echoes last year’s report from the National Council on Teacher Quality, a
report that has been roundly criticized by a wide range of experts.
4. The
National Academy of Education recently issued a comprehensive report on
evaluating teacher education programs that recommends an approach very
different from yours. Have you read it or consulted its authors?
5. There
is an increasing number of respected scholarly organizations—the National
Academies Board on Testing and Assessment, AERA, the National Academy of
Education, the American Statistical Association—that are advising caution in
the use of procedures like value-added to evaluate teacher effectiveness. These
organizations point to technical, logistical, and conceptual problems in
conducting such evaluations. One conceptual problem is imputing causality
between teachers’ activity and a test score, for so many other variables come
into play. Your stated plan will use student test scores to not only judge
teachers, but also the institutions from which they come, introducing another
level of questionable causal attribution in your model. You will have a
putative causal chain that goes from the student test score to the teacher to
the teacher’s training institution. How do you plan to address this basic
conceptual problem?
6. The
implication in your plan that bad schools will go out of business assumes that
all prospective teachers are the economist’s idealized free agents who can go
wherever a highly rated program exists. But a number of prospective teachers
from lower income backgrounds do not have the finances to travel—or cannot
travel because of family obligations and expectations. How will you address the
possible unintended consequence of your program placing burdens on this segment
of the population? What will you do to assure that you don’t restrict access to
the teaching profession?
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It seems to me that UCLA/Center X, home of its own teacher training program, should be ashamed for not advocating on behalf of public schools and for following the Common Core money trail instead. Although this blog questions the new plan to evaluate teacher training programs (and rightly so), where are the voices for public school teachers under attack--including those from UCLA?
ReplyDeleteIt seems to me that UCLA/Center X, with its own teacher training program, should be ashamed for not publicly advocating for public schools and instead following the Common Core money trail. Your blog rightly questions the plan to evaluate teacher training programs, but where are the voices for public schools/public teachers under attack, including those educated by your own university?
ReplyDelete