In 2011, Ohio lawmakers introduced a state initiative focused on new teachers—specifically, those who were in the first four years of their career. The policy was referred to in law as the Ohio teacher residency program, though it’s now more widely known now as the Resident Educator Program (REP), and it was designed to mimic the residency model used by the medical field. Like doctors, Ohio teachers would graduate from training programs and then complete a residency under the watchful eye of veterans who were charged with mentoring them. Every newly licensed teacher in the state was required to participate in the program, and successful completion was a prerequisite for moving on to a professional and renewable teaching license.
According to the Ohio Department of Education, the goals of REP were to “improve teacher retention, enhance teacher quality, and result in improved student achievement.” Given the evidence pointing to the benefits of induction and mentoring programs for new teachers, lawmakers were right to think that REP could accomplish those goals. Moreover, setting a high bar for teachers to enter and remain in the classroom is important. Research is clear that teachers matter most among school-related factors when it comes to students’ academic performance, and quality teaching improves not only student achievement, but labor market outcomes.
Unfortunately, research and good intentions weren’t enough to take REP from promising policy to standard practice. That’s because almost immediately after the initiative went into effect, lawmakers started to tinker with it, and they’ve yet to stop. To be clear, not all of these adjustments were bad. But they were made prior to earnest implementation and without hard data to back them up, and that’s resulted in death by a thousand cuts for a teacher residency program that had a lot of potential.
Don’t just take my word for it, though. Consider the following timeline of changes:
- In 2015, the state budget made several changes to the residency program. Chief among them was an effort to raise the bar for teachers—a crucial policy goal, given how much teachers matter. In this case, lawmakers sought to raise expectations via the Resident Educator Summative Assessment (RESA), a performance-based test prescribed by the state board that requires teachers to submit a portfolio of tasks online, including videos of them teaching, so that trained reviewers can evaluate their ability to design and deliver high-quality instruction. Specifically, the budget included a provision that identified RESA as one of the required “measures of appropriate progression” through REP. Since successfully completing REP was already a prerequisite for a professional educator license, and resident educators had to obtain a professional license to continue teaching in Ohio, this change effectively made passing RESA a requirement for any new educator who wanted to make teaching their long-term career.
- In 2017, the General Assembly did an about face and attempted to eliminate the residency program. These efforts appeared to be driven by significant pushback from the field regarding the 2015 changes, namely the expectation that new teachers had to pass a tough performance-based assessment to remain in the classroom. Rather than stand their ground, lawmakers caved and sought to get rid of the policy in its entirety. A last-minute veto from Governor Kasich saved the program, but the complaints prompted a significant administrative overhaul of the test soon after. The biggest change was to significantly decrease the amount of work required of resident educators. Now, instead of completing four graded tasks to pass the assessment, they have to complete just one. The overhaul also changed how teachers are graded on RESA and how they receive those grades.
- Beginning in 2018, resident educators were permitted no more than three total attempts to successfully complete RESA. Those who failed to pass after three attempts would be permanently ineligible to advance to a professional license or to renew or extend their existing resident educator or alternative resident educator license. This change—another attempt to hold a high bar—meant that not only did new teachers have to pass a performance-based assessment to remain in the classroom, they only had three tries to do so.
- In 2021, House lawmakers tried and failed to amend the law so that teachers could take RESA an unlimited number of times. That same year, legislation was enacted that reduced the duration of REP from four years to two.
- In the 2023 budget, lawmakers made some changes aimed at streamlining the support new teachers receive through the program. For example, mentoring for novice teachers can now be provided online or in-person. Going forward, teachers and mentors will have free access to online professional development resources and sample videos of lessons submitted for RESA purposes. And novice teachers who do not receive a passing score on RESA will be provided with the opportunity (at no cost) to meet online with a trained instructional coach who will review the teacher’s RESA results and discuss with them strategies and professional development that could help them improve. The budget also includes a provision that prohibits the state board from limiting the number of attempts novice teachers have to successfully complete RESA.
Clearly, Ohio’s novice-teacher policy has been on a rollercoaster for more than a decade. As a result, the state’s promising residency program has been transformed into one of those “what I ordered versus what I got” memes that proliferate on social media. There is a mentorship component. But it only lasts two years, mentorship doesn’t have to happen in-person, and there’s no clear-cut accountability for mentors or schools to ensure they’re doing right by new teachers. There’s also a performance-based assessment. But it’s been significantly simplified, and teachers have as many bites of the apple as they need.
Worst of all, this isn’t a first-of-its-kind transformation. Ohio leaders do this all too often. They decide to take a stand by setting high expectations and pushing for improvement. They receive predictable but persistent pushback. And then they cave to the pushback and repeatedly water down standards until the new policy is indistinguishable from the original policy they set out to improve. One need look no further than the not-so-distant wars over school intervention, graduation requirements, and reading retention for proof. Unfortunately, after more than a decade of turmoil, it seems we can now add novice teachers to the list, too.
