Impact of teacher preparation rules unclear

Credit: Lillian Mongeau/EdSource Today

The Obama assistants last calendar week announced typhoon regulations to evaluate the effectiveness of more than ii,000 teacher grooming programs nationwide, but how exactly they would apply to California is unclear.

The draft regulations come at a time not but when the land must train a  new generation of teachers to teach using the Mutual Core Land Standards, the new academic standards in math and  reading adopting by 43 states, but likewise when it faces declining enrollments in its instructor preparation programs.

If the regulations are implemented, states would have to rank these programs in iv categories: low-performing, at-gamble, effective or infrequent.  The event of the evaluation could have "loftier-stakes" consequences – only programs ranked "effective" or "exceptional" for two out of the previous three years would be eligible to provide their teachers-in-training with financial aid through the federal Teacher Teaching Assistance for College and Higher Educational activity, or TEACH program. The educatee aid program requires recipients to teach in a high-need field like math or science or in a schoolhouse serving low-income students.

During the 2013-14 school year, the federal government provided $6.4 meg in TEACH grants to 2,641 students enrolled in teacher preparation programs in California. That is out of about 32,000 students who received grants through the $95 million program nationally.

"We don't believe there is a one-size-fits-all solution hither," said U.Due south. Secretary of Instruction Arne Duncan. "What is correct for California is not necessarily right for North Dakota. But we believe states are the right place to take leadership and ownership of this work."

The proposed regulations land that administrators of teacher pedagogy programs would have to conduct surveys of their graduates and the principals of the schools where they work to gauge their respective levels of satisfaction, provide data on placement and retention rates, and use other measures to assess their effectiveness.

For California, the nearly contentious criterion listed could be the requirement that new teachers be evaluated on "measures of student growth, performance on state or local instructor evaluation measures that include data on student growth, or both, during their first three pedagogy years."

In most states, these measures of educatee growth have included using students' scores on standardized tests. California is one of only a handful of states that take resisted pressures from the Obama administration to move toward using test scores of students to evaluate teachers. The state has likewise resisted requiring districts to use a controversial "value added" statistical methodology that projects how a student should score on a test past taking into business relationship certain demographic and other background factors, and then ranks a instructor based on the "value added" scores of the instructor's students.

During a telephone printing conference in Washington, D.C., concluding week, U.S. Secretary of Teaching Arne Duncan went out of his style to say that states would have maximum flexibility in evaluating their teacher preparation programs.

"I believe that states can be labs of innovation," he said. "We don't believe there is a 1-size-fits-all solution here. What is right for California is not necessarily right for North Dakota. But we believe states are the right place to have leadership and buying of this work."

U.S. Undersecretary of Education Ted Mitchell, a former president of the California'south State Board of Education, underscored that message.

"These regulations do not demand that states charge per unit teacher preparation programs on the ground of  how well students complete standardized  tests, nor does it require states to utilise value added methodology," he said. "What information technology does do is crave states to come up with a measure of student learning outcomes which nosotros believe strongly needs to be based on multiple measures. Nosotros are asking states to use, for example, either their own country regimens, or local teacher evaluation metrics to be able to do that…. To be very clear, we are not basing the evaluation of teacher pedagogy programs on merely student standardized examination score functioning."

But the assistants'south reference to "multiple measures" is widely understood to include measuring educatee performance through examination scores. Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, worried that the proposed regulations would brand it less likely that aspiring teachers would would want to teach in communities where students have lower test scores — and discourage teacher grooming programs from placing their graduates in classrooms in that location.

"This will crusade programs to reconsider placing their graduates in schools that serve our most vulnerable students," she said in a argument. "And aspiring teachers who come from disadvantaged backgrounds will find their opportunities closed down as accountability pressures ascent without increased back up."

In response to follow-up queries seeking clarification, a statement provided to EdSource by the U.S. Department of Education did not country directly whether California would need to include examination scores every bit one of the "multiple measures" that must exist used to assess a student'due south bookish growth.

Los Angeles philanthropist Eli Broad, the founder of the Eli and Edythe Wide Foundation, welcomed the regulations, and emphasized the importance of teacher preparation programs giving their students opportunities to be in a classroom earlier they get their credential. "They need to provide more high-quality classroom experience for their students before they graduate," Wide told the Los Angeles Times. "They also have to work with school districts to better meet the needs of today's public schools. The new regulations are a step in the correct management."

Officials with the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing say the land is already moving to revamp accreditation of teacher teaching programs. They will be looking at data from each program, such as surveys of both employers and graduates of the plan, how many graduates actually enter teaching, and their retention rates once they do, and requirements for exiting the plan, such as teacher performance assessments.

The commission will discuss the draft regulations at its meeting Dec. 11 and 12 in Sacramento. The commission accredits approximately 260 teacher preparation institutions. Last year, out of 33 institutions reviewed for accreditation, 24 were accredited, seven were accredited with stipulations, and only one – the modest teacher preparation program run by Envision Schools, which operates iii lease schools – had its accreditation revoked.

An boosted challenge for California is declining enrollment in teacher grooming programs. The numbers have plummeted over the last decade or then, from 77,500 in 2001-02, to under xx,000 in 2012-thirteen, the last twelvemonth for which figures are available.

The regulations incorporate two changes from earlier drafts, according to Pedagogy Week. The timeline for complying with the new regulations has been extended, and withholding of TEACH grants for underperforming programs wouldn't begin until at least 2020. STEM (science, engineering science, applied science, and mathematics) teacher certification programs would still be able to offer TEACH grants even if they aren't rated every bit effective – as long every bit grant recipients "completed a year of their service requirements within iii years of graduating."

California educators have a chance to weigh in on the regulations during the 60-day public comment period. The last dominion will exist published in mid-June.

"This is a draft," Duncan emphasized terminal week. "We look forward to people'due south feedback to make this amend, stronger, smarter."

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Source: https://edsource.org/2014/impact-of-draft-teacher-preparation-regulations-unclear/70561