The Education Gadfly Weekly

It strikes me, and several others with whom I’ve spoken in recent months, that education reform is at a turning point. It’s not just the new federal law, the Every Student Succeeds Act, which sends key decisions back to the states. It’s bigger than that—a sense of exhaustion with policy as the primary driver of educational change.

To be sure, there are many policy battles still to fight and win in almost every state: to ensure that school and teacher accountability do not disappear, to defend and expand high-quality charter schools and other forms of parental choice, to do something about chronically low-performing schools, to see that high-achieving poor kids don’t go ignored, and much more.  

It’s as critical as ever that advocacy organizations like the newly merged 50CAN and StudentsFirst attract the funding and talent to ensure that kid-centered laws and regulations are put in place from sea to shining sea. The teachers’ unions—newly energized after their near-death experience in the Friedrichs case and their victory in Vergara—surely have the money and resolve to push hard in the opposite direction. And when it comes to preserving the status quo and not threatening any adult interests, they have plenty of allies. But policy change alone is not going to get us to the promised land of more effective, productive, and equitable schools.

I’m obviously not the first to reach this realization. As often happens, Rick Hess beat me there by a country mile. In his 2013 National Affairs article, “The Missing Half of School Reform,” he argued,

While public policy can make people do things, it cannot make people do those things well. This is especially salient in education for two reasons. First, state and federal policy makers do not run schools; they merely write laws and regulations telling school districts what principals and teachers ought to do. And second, schooling is a complex, highly personal endeavor, which means that what happens at the individual level—the level of the teacher and the student—is the most crucial factor in separating failure from success. In education, there is often a vast distance between policy and practice.

Getting the right policies enacted and implemented can do a world of good. But for the reasons Rick explains, it can’t do it all. And it’s certainly not the only way—or even the best way—to change practice for the better.

Here are five ideas beyond policy change to reform our schools and encourage effective practice. I’ve listed them in order from the most radical to the least.

1. Build a new system via charter schools, education savings accounts, or similar mechanisms. If the old system is broken, impervious to change, and politically dysfunctional, then focus on replacing it with something different. This is the genius of the twenty-five-year-old charter sector, which (though not perfect) is showing that good schools can be scaled as long as the right mix of policies, funding mechanisms, and civil society structures are in place. Libertarians want to go even further with education savings accounts. Policy change is needed to birth these new systems, but philanthropists, social entrepreneurs, and others can do a whole lot to help them live up to their potential. The potent mix of autonomy, accountability, and parental choice appears to create an environment in which good schools—those constantly searching for ways to improve their practice—can flourish.

2. Spur “disruptive innovations” that target teachers, parents, and/or students directly. Again, if the system is the problem, then go around it. Create and sell (or give away) products and services that target the “end user” (students) or those close to them (teachers and parents) and don’t require the permission of any administrator or bureaucrat. For instance, the College Board is going straight to kids by linking PSAT scores to practice modules on the Khan Academy website. Class Dojo and Learn Zillion are capturing incredible market share among American teachers without messing with district procurement processes. Curriculum providers for homeschoolers know how to target parents, and they may expand their offerings to us parents who “home-school” at night and on the weekends. There’s lots and lots more that might be done here, particularly with the support of philanthropists.

3. Invest in leadership. Maybe the reason that policies haven’t spurred more of their intended change is that our educational leaders—at both the school and district levels—aren’t prepared to respond constructively to the pressures created by standards, testing, and accountability. They came up in a highly regulated, bureaucratized system and developed coping strategies that aren’t well suited to the new challenge of getting results. But if we could find new ways to recruit, select, train, and support our leaders—equipping them with the skills and services they need to succeed—perhaps they could make good use of newfound freedoms and respond effectively to accountability and competitive pressures. The big question is this: Who’s the “we”? Who could bring new models of leadership development to life? There might be a few things that policy makers could do, such as making changes to principal licensure requirements or tweaking the regulations governing leadership preparation programs. But this is mostly an area begging for philanthropic leadership and investment—and perhaps, as with my first suggestion, the creation of an alternative system.

4. Professionalize the education system by identifying evidence-based practices and developing mechanisms for getting them into the schools. Imagine if we had more talented and well-trained leaders, ready to respond to accountability pressures and driven to find practices that work best for kids. Would they know where to look? Most professions have a way of systematically adjudicating the evidence about “what works” in their fields and turn it into clear guidance for practice. (Think about the way medical specialties do this.) Entrants into the profession learn about these practices in their training, demonstrate their knowledge through board exams, and must use effective procedures or else risk losing their licenses. What if philanthropists worked to create similar professional structures for education? Imagine, for example, a new Academy of Elementary School Educators, which teachers and principals could join if they passed a rigorous board exam about evidence-based practices; a regular process to develop and disseminate a volume, Evidence-Based Practices for Elementary Education, that (akin to the What Works Clearinghouse or its “practice guides”) accumulated the best research on all aspects of practice; and a voluntary accreditation or inspectorate system that sent well-trained educators into schools to provide feedback on their fidelity to those evidence-based practices. Might all of this help to move the field rapidly toward better approaches for kids? If, that is, it avoided capture by various political and ideological elements?

5. Develop and sell new products into the education system. While I am drawn to the leadership development and knowledge dissemination strategies outlined above, they are both heavy lifts. To succeed, they require a sea change in the culture of schooling—leaders with very different skills playing very different roles, and teachers willing to look far beyond their classrooms for evidence and ideas about what works. Perhaps a better bet is to take advantage of a well-worn path for educational change: Sell schools services and products that will improve their practices. For example, rather than just pointing to the research evidence on what makes for a strong elementary curriculum, build the curriculum itself, sell it to schools, and in doing so replace poor practice with something that works. Not that this is easy; it means designing a great product that can be implemented effectively by mere mortals, building a sales force to get it into the schools, and overcoming powerful incumbents. But the payoff in terms of change could be enormous.

In the coming weeks, I’m going to expand upon each of these ideas, discuss promising approaches that are already underway, and suggest how more such efforts might be nurtured by philanthropists, policy makers, think tanks, and others. Along the way, I’d love your feedback (and pushback). Reach me at mpetrilli (at) edexcellence.net.

Every teacher of low-income children and English language learners has had this moment: You're sitting with a student, working line by line through a text, grappling with what should be fairly simple comprehension questions.

"Did you read it?" you ask. "I read it," the child replies. "But I didn't get it."

This is what reading failure often looks like in a struggling school. A child can read the words on a page in front of him, but he can't always make sense of them. The commonsense solution for both teachers and policy makers has been to make more time for reading instruction. That makes sense, but it hasn't worked, because reading comprehension is not a skill that can be practiced and mastered like a basketball free throw. Children's ability to understand what they read is intimately intertwined with their background knowledge and vocabulary. If a child is not broadly educated, he won't be fully literate.

John King made precisely this point last Thursday in a remarkable speech in Las Vegas. The newly minted secretary of education is pushing for schools to take advantage of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) to give every child the kind of broad background "that engages and intrigues kids, allowing them to discover interests in the arts and the sciences and world languages and so much else." He also touched on another reason why a rich and varied education is critical: It's how you build a reader.

If there's ever been a case of "wrong for all the right reasons," it's the laser-like focus on reading and math that has been the hallmark of schooling for the last few decades and was enshrined in education policy under the No Child Left Behind Act. There's a surface plausibility to the idea that nothing matters more than reading, but we've followed this well-intentioned idea off a cliff.

When I was a new teacher at P.S. 277 in the South Bronx, fewer than 20 percent of my fifth graders scored at proficient levels in reading. There was no shortage of explanations: poverty, low expectations, lousy teachers. Kids weren't engaged; they didn't have the opportunity to partake in "authentic" reading and writing that reflected their lives and interests. But one man’s work explained precisely what I was seeing in my classroom every day.

In 1987, E.D. Hirsch published Cultural Literacy. The book was an out-of-nowhere blockbuster that spent most of the year on the New York Times bestseller list, largely on the strength of the book's list of five thousand people, events, books, and concepts that Hirsch claimed were an integral part of a well-rounded education. It sparked an important debate about what every American should know, but Hirsch's main point was lost: Language proficiency rests on a common body of knowledge. The words we read, write, speak, and hear are the visible tip of a verbal iceberg. Meaning comes from what's beneath the surface—and inside the recipient's mind. To understand one another, writers, readers, speakers, and listeners need more in common than twenty-six letters of the alphabet and the words they form. They also need common context. The phrase "Dickensian squalor" means nothing unless you know a little bit about Charles Dickens and his novels, for example. Literate people know things and assume their readers do as well. When they don't, meaning suffers. They read it. But they don't get it.

The importance of shared knowledge in our economically and culturally diverse country cannot be overstated. Accordingly, King framed his call for a well-rounded education as a matter of "educational justice." Too often, he noted, "It's kids from low-income families and kids of color who start out on the wrong side of those word gaps. Frequently, they are the ones who may miss out on a wide range of experiences, from museum visits to travel. And too often, they are the ones who lack access to a wide range of challenging courses once they get to school." This is precisely correct.

There was no conspiracy to deny low-income children and kids of color a fulsome education, but the results would be the same if there had been. Educators interpreted poor academic performance as the inevitable effect of poverty outside of school and a lack of curricular relevance and student engagement inside the classroom. Policy makers interpreted low performance as low expectations, poor teaching, and a lack of urgency. And we all agreed that science, history, art, and music are all well and good, but resolved mostly to first make sure that all the kids could read. King's speech is a critical and long overdue call to re-examine our assumption about education's thorniest problem: why it's been so damn hard to raise reading achievement even as we focused more effort on it.

Significantly, the secretary did not shy away from discussing the role that testing has played in narrowing the focus of schools to reading, math, and not much else. Done well and thoughtfully, testing provides vital information aimed at ensuring equity. "But in some places, an exclusive emphasis on the tested subjects drove a narrowing of what was taught and learned," he noted. "There is a lot of reason to believe that students are not getting the instruction in science, social studies, the arts, and world languages that they need."

The secretary cited one study that found students spending only about twenty minutes each day on social studies and little more on science. "I count myself among those who worry that the balance has shifted too much away from subjects outside of math and English, subjects that can be the spark to a child's interest and excitement, are actually essential to success in reading, and are critical to a child's future." King also correctly noted that "decades of research from folks like Daniel Willingham at the University of Virginia illustrate that students with broad knowledge are actually stronger readers." Most significantly, the new secretary noted that the Every Student Succeeds Act—passed by Congress and signed by the president last year to replace the unlamented No Child Left Behind—means "the opportunity to widen how we understand educational excellence is suddenly ripe."

That's why King's words matter. He read the research, the data on curriculum narrowing and the unintended consequences of test-driven accountability practices.

Editor's note: This piece was originally published in a slightly different form at U.S. News & World Report.

Career and technical education (CTE) schools and academies are important and impactful, but they’re also scarce and expensive. To develop the skills of the millions of students who want high-quality CTE, we must be more egalitarian in the ways students access it—and the prospects for economic stability and success that it can create.

CTE is not just about the courses students take; it’s also about form: how, when, and where courses are delivered. And this varies depending on the state, district, and even school.

In most cases, the courses a student can take are determined by what’s available at the school site where they are enrolled. Most traditional high schools offer basic CTE classes in addition to academic coursework. Some host school-within-a-school “career academies” where academy students take CTE coursework focused around a single career theme (while taking academic classes at the host school); non-academy students can’t take these classes. There are also fully independent, self-contained career/technical high schools that serve as enrolled students’ home schools. Like academies, CTE schools usually focus on developing students’ skills to prepare them to enter a particular industry.

Some CTE programing is open to more students. Centralized locations called regional technical centers offer a diverse variety of CTE coursework. Students from multiple schools, and sometimes even multiple districts, travel to a regional center to take CTE classes while still enrolled in their “home” high schools. Finally, students who participate in dual enrollment earn high school credit for CTE courses taken at a community college.

While academies and self-contained CTE schools have important, positive academic and economic effects on students, access to them is extremely limited. Less than 4 percent of high schools in the United States are CTE schools. And although there are no recent data on the number of academies, there aren’t many, and they typically only enroll between thirty and sixty students per grade. Even in New York City, where they’ve gone all-in on both CTE schools and academies, demand far outstrips supply. “Some programs are so popular with middle-class families that they have trouble balancing their student bodies to meet the needs of a representative cross-section of New Yorkers,” note Tamar Jacoby and Shaun Dougherty. Likewise, eleven thousand students in Philadelphia—nearly one-third of all high schoolers—applied for 2,500 available seats in a CTE program. In Massachusetts, CTE schools have long waiting lists but can’t accept more students because of administrator-reported shortages in physical space, financial resources, staff, and equipment.

Our failure to increase the supply of CTE to meet demand is a huge waste of human capital, and it is especially problematic in an economy suffering from a long-term shortage of skilled workers for entry-level positions—especially those that do not require a four-year degree.

Schools and districts aren’t deliberately creating a shortage of opportunities. CTE schools and academies are expensive to build and run, often requiring custom-built labs with specialized equipment and teachers, in addition to the standard operating costs of providing academic instruction. Some schools form industry partnerships with companies like IBM, which are attractive to businesses because they prepare potential employees and are good for an organization’s reputation (not to mention the fact that these partnerships are highly recommended by the current Perkins Act, and could be mandatory come its reauthorization). But even when partnerships work out, businesses aren’t going to fund the education of thousands of students across multiple sites. Smaller cities that are not home to large, successful companies with which to partner are even worse off.

To meaningfully develop the skills of millions of students who want high-quality CTE, we must increase access to courses and facilities. The easiest solution is dual enrollment: Support and encourage high school students to take the CTE classes already being offered at community colleges. To do this, we have to fix the state policies that dictate how dual enrollment is funded. In most states, the tuition to pay for the coursework comes from some combination of the district, the student, and the community college. Yet schools and districts have little incentive to encourage dual enrollment if they have to pay the post-secondary institution to provide the courses, and community colleges have no desire to go along if state law says they have to waive tuition. (Worse, in some states, the law allows high schools and/or community colleges to deny students participation.) And asking students to pay their own way will exclude low-income families.

States can expand CTE by requiring districts and schools to allow eligible students to participate in dual enrollment and equitably distributing funding across institutions. Federal legislation via Perkins reauthorization can support the latter by creating a system by which states use federal funds to cover student tuition in CTE classes directly—much like “backpack funding,” but at the course level.

It’s also imperative that state and federal CTE laws focus more on quality and less on strict prescriptions for specific coursework delivery models. Despite being favored by policy makers, CTE schools and academies already don’t provide enough seats. A move toward stringent requirements for industry partnerships limits them even more. At the same time, legislation that exclusively prioritizes academies does so at the expense of regional technical centers. By capitalizing on economy of scale, centers can give thousands of students access to high-tech, state-of-the-art facilities. State and federal law should support and fund these centers too.

Finally, support for CTE must be tied to whether coursework is relevant to the state’s economy. It’s true that many high-growth industries require CTE preparation in STEM, especially for jobs located in urban areas. But in some states, funding for less glamorous fields like agriculture are at risk—despite the fact that preparation for modern agricultural careers is just as high-tech and valuable to certain states as preparation for writing computer code. Unfortunately, too many laws incentivize STEM-focused CTE at the expense of other skills. That has to change.

The cause of school choice took a major step forward in Florida last week when Governor Rick Scott signed a bill codifying open enrollment and increasing funding for charter schools. The new law directs $75 million toward capital projects for the state’s 650 charter schools, weighted especially toward those that serve disabled students or those from low-income families. (In addition to the funding carrot, legislators introduced an accountability stick: Charters will now submit compulsory financial statements on a monthly or quarterly basis, and those that receive F ratings for two consecutive years will be automatically shuttered.) But the headline result is undoubtedly the introduction of open enrollment, which will allow students—with particular preference given to highly mobile kids in military families and foster care—to attend any public school in the state with slots open.

Scant weeks after their narrow victory in the Supreme Court’s Friedrichs case, teachers’ unions have won another critical battle—this time at the state level—with a friendly ruling in Vergara v. California. A three-judge appeals court panel overturned the original ruling from Judge Rolf Treu, which invalidated state laws around teacher tenure and due process rights. The case, which hinges on guarantees of equitable education in the California Constitution, will soon head to the state supreme court; meanwhile, copycat litigants in New York and Minnesota are pursuing a similar strategy in their own state courts. Reformers are right to try to reshape teacher tenure in public schools—even the Vergara panel conceded that ineffective teachers are being disproportionately assigned to schools servicing mostly poor students, though they blamed districts rather than state law—but not every grievance can be cured through the legal system. If we want to create a new, better version of public school employment, it’s worth doing the old-fashioned way: by winning elections and passing sensible, durable new laws.

Education observers end up splitting their attention between a lot of disparate facets of schooling: choice, teacher quality, testing and accountability, curriculum, local democracy (in the form of school board elections), and governance. Probably the most unloved and unsexy aspect of all this, though, is school finance. It shouldn’t be so; a simple perusal of major city newspapers will provide abundant examples of struggling districts that lost sight of the bottom line and paid a dear price. Thankfully, National Public Radio is embarking on an important (and, in a decidedly un-school-finance-y twist, totally riveting) project to document the importance of money in K–12 education. The audio and web series will include three weeks of stories about the huge resource disparities between America’s school districts—and how they affect the students enrolled in them. The first installment even comes with a terrific interactive map of school spending by every district in the country, adjusted for regional cost differences. Don’t let this one go unnoticed. 

On this week's podcast, Alyssa Schwenk and Robert Pondiscio discuss the Vergara defeat, Education Secretary John King's call for a "well-rounded" American education, and Hillary Clinton's stance on standardized testing. In the Research Minute, Amber Northern explains recent teacher implementation efforts of new K-12 standards for mathematics and English language arts.

Amber's Research Minute

V. Darleen Opfer, Julia H. Kaufman, and Lindsey E. Thomspon, "Implementation of K-12 State Standards for Mathematics and English Language Arts and Literacy," RAND (April 2016).

A new study from RAND uses information from teacher polling to examine state implementation of the Common Core State Standards. The data are drawn from two nationally representative surveys of U.S. educators (both K–12 math and ELA teachers) administered in summer and fall 2015. Both had response rates ranging from 57 to 62 percent, with roughly 1,100–1,700 participants responding to each. The questionnaires focus on teachers’ perceptions and practices as they relate to key instructional approaches reflected primarily in the standards. My seven critical takeaways are these:

1) When asked if they ever used particular materials, the majority of math teachers generally report developing materials themselves (97 percent of elementary teachers). Over forty percent of all surveyed elementary teachers claimed that they used the popular and universally available Engage NY.

2) Ninety-eight percent of elementary teachers report using leveled readers, and  those who do so weekly or daily describe various applications for them. For instance, high percentages (68 percent) say they use the readers to support struggling students in place of the grade-level text other students are reading. (Yet Common Core supports the teaching of grade-appropriate texts with the idea that teacher support and explanation, not text difficulty, is what should be differentiated to meet the needs of struggling readers.). Sixty-six percent use them for free reading time, and 41 percent use them as an entry point for struggling students before introducing a more challenging text for the whole class to read together.

3) When it comes to online resources, the most popular are Google and Pinterest for both math and ELA teachers.

4) When asked whether the instructional materials they use support particular CCSS practices, many respondents say that their materials support “to a great extent” opportunities for  students to use evidence from a text to make inferences or support conclusions drawn from the text (61 percent of secondary ELA teachers), and to read a fictional text of sufficient grade level complexity (54 percent of secondary ELA teachers). Fewer responded similarly for “adapting speech to a variety of contexts,”  “writing short or sustained research projects,” or “strengthening writing by planning, revising, [and] editing text.”

5) One-quarter of all teachers have received no professional development on their curricula; vast majorities have received fewer than eight hours.

6) RAND researchers took a page from our October 2013 report and asked ELA teachers whether they used a skills- or text- centric approach. Three-quarters of elementary and secondary ELA teachers say that they focus on reading skills first and organize teaching around them; between 21 and 23 percent choose particular texts for students to read and organize instruction around them. The latter obviously represents the more text-centered approach, and the one endorsed by the Common Core. (Incidentally, our findings from three years ago were reminiscent—73% of elementary teachers used a skills-based approach.)

7) The survey also queried teachers about their understanding of connections among standards across grade levels (part of “coherence”). In math, elementary teachers were more likely to identify the correct below-grade and above-grade standards that prepared students relative to the named or referent standard. But the authors also remarked that the sequence of standards at the elementary level is clearer than at the secondary level.

The report recommends that ELA teachers receive more guidance around what close reading means and when (and when not) to use leveled readers. Math teachers need guidance on how to balance conceptual understanding, procedural fluency, and real-world applications.

It seems to me, however, that the data also indicate that publishers are making headway on attending to some CCSS priorities (though not all—got writing?). Disturbingly, ELA teachers overwhelmingly continue to adopt a skills-centered approach rather than one centered on text. That doesn’t bode well for them adopting content-rich approaches either.

SOURCE: V. Darleen Opfer, Julia H. Kaufman, Lindsey E. Thompson, "Implementation of K-12 State Standards for Mathematics and English Language Arts and Literacy," RAND Corporation (April 2016). 

In a new policy proposal from Brookings, researchers suggest a straightforward way to help the thousands of students who fall behind each year to catch up: individualized tutorials. The proposal is based on a model developed in 2004 by Match Education at its high school. Match—a highly respected charter network with four campuses that span grades pre-K–12—implements a high-dosage tutoring program at all of its schools.

In 2014, Match formed SAGA Innovations as a vehicle to extend its model into traditional public school systems. It works like this: Two students who have fallen behind in math are paired with a single tutor. Tutorials occur every school day, in addition to regular math classes. The small tutor-to-student ratio allows for individualized instruction and meaningful relationships. Students begin at the lowest math skill they have yet to master and then progress into more advanced work as their proficiency improves. Frequent assessments measure progress and pinpoint new areas for growth.

To test how this program would fare in traditional public schools, researchers conducted a large-scale, randomized controlled trial during the 2013–14 school year in twelve disadvantaged Chicago high schools. With the help of Chicago Public Schools (CPS), researchers identified over 2,700 incoming male ninth and tenth graders who were at an elevated risk of dropping out. Approximately six hundred students were randomly assigned tutorial intervention, while the control group continued to receive the usual services provided by CPS. Ninety-five percent of participants in the study were either black or Hispanic, 90 percent were eligible for free or reduced-price lunch, and 49 percent had failed at least one course the prior year. Participants had also missed about a month of school on average and carried a 2.2 GPA.

Results from the trial are impressive. Researchers estimate that the program helped students gain between one and two extra years of math above what is normally learned in a single year. Students who participated in the tutorials also saw substantial gains in math test scores compared to the control group (as measured by ACT’s Explore and Plan tests and additional math achievement tests administered to a randomly selected sub-sample). Participating students improved their math grades, and the chances that they would fail their math courses were cut in half. Students improved in other subjects as well: Their chances of failing a non-math course were reduced by 25 percent. Finally, researchers found that the program narrowed the black/white test score gap by almost one-third in one year (though they also point out that this intervention would not cut the test score gap by that much every year).

Of course, no policy proposal would be complete without a discussion of costs. The researchers note that the program spends about $3,800 annually per student, but they estimate that this amount could be lowered to $2,500 per student if the program were delivered on a large scale. The authors suggest that districts use Title I funds or take advantage of ESSA’s new provision allowing states to reserve up to 3 percent of funding for “direct student services” such as tutoring. (In most places, though, federal funds won’t be nearly sufficient.) Finding enough tutors is another important question, though the researchers have a clear answer for that as well. Match currently operates their program with thousands of students in several cities but continues to receive approximately 5–20 applications for every opening. Overall, despite the high cost, Match’s individualized tutorial program is a promising idea—one that struggling districts would be wise to consider.

SOURCE: Roseanna Ander, Jonathan Guryan, and Jens Ludwig, “Improving Academic Outcomes for Disadvantaged Students: Scaling Up Individualized Tutorials,” Brookings Institution, (March 2016). 

A new report from the Hope Street Group examines the quality of states’ teacher preparation programs.

The authors, all teachers themselves, conducted in-person focus groups and administered online surveys over six weeks between September and October 2015. Their sample included 1,988 certified educators in forty-nine states and the District of Columbia whose teaching experience ranged from one to thirty-one years across all grades and subjects. Authors conducted qualitative and content analysis to identify, categorize, and present reoccurring themes from the teacher’s responses.

Respondents were asked the same questions: If your state was going to evaluate teacher preparation programs, which measures should be included? Did your preparation program offer any specific courses related to serving in areas of high-need or persistently low-achieving populations? As you reflect on your teacher preparation experiences, what do you wish you’d had more of in terms of pedagogy? How have new college- and career-ready standards changed your instructional practices? And what would you change about teacher preparation for the next generation of teachers?

Over half the teachers reported lacking instruction about serving high-needs or persistently low-achieving populations; they also noted that their only exposure to college- and career-ready standards came through on-the-job experiences or in-service professional development, rather than pre-service training. And many lacked preparation in areas as common as classroom and behavior management, hands-on experiences, differentiated instruction, and child and adolescent development.

The findings add to a large body of research highlighting the need to upgrade teacher preparation to better reflect educators’ on-the-job needs. To move the needle in the right direction, the authors counsel that teacher preparation programs adopt common curricula. Further, they call on the federal government to institute funding mechanisms that incentivize collaboration between schools of education and local districts. Finally, they recommend using teacher retention data as an essential metric in pre-service program evaluation, as well as job placement data, graduation rates, educator effectiveness (student growth, observations, etc.), college pre-service coursework, opportunities for hands-on teaching, and feedback from teachers’ pre-service experiences.

SOURCE: “On Deck: Preparing the Next Generation of Teachers,” Hope Street Group (March 2016).