Teacher preparation

At the April 5th Lancaster ISD board meeting, we saw that LISD depends heavily on new teachers, recently graduated, with little actual classroom experience.

The Dallas Morning News today cites a study from the National Council on Teacher Quality showing recently graduated new teachers are "not adequately prepared for the classroom."

The NCTQ quotes President Obama's Secretary of Education and former Texas hot shot Arne Duncan: "“ By almost any standard, many if not most of the nation’s 1,450 schools, colleges and departments of education are doing a mediocre job of preparing teachers for the realities

of the 21st century classroom.”

Key findings:

1. The number of teachers capable of making the kinds of gains necessary to close the Achievement Gap between white, middle class children and poor, minority children is small—roughly only one in seven teachers.

2. The group of teachers that is most likely to impede student progress is first-year teachers, regardless of what kind or how much preparation they have had.

3. Research looking at formal teacher preparation in the aggregate (not individual programs) has yet to find that teachers who have formal teacher preparation are more apt to be effective than

teachers who have had little to no preparation.

4. a. We know that low admissions standards let too many teachers into the profession who lack the requisite skills to be effective.

4.b. Teachers who don’t know their subject matter can’t teach it.

4.c. Teachers who don’t know how to manage their classroom and who don’t have other basic professional skills are unable to be effective.

4- conclusion These problems are all traced back to poor teacher preparation.

Specifically in Texas, the NCTQ found:

- The most consistent feature of teacher education in Texas is a lack of consistency. Rather

than consensus there is inter-institutional confusion as to what it means to fully prepare a teacher for the classroom.

- The content preparation of many Texas teachers is inadequate.

- Many education schools patronize their teacher candidates, placing a high value on “edu-tainment” at the expense of rigor and intellectual engagement.

-An inattention to output data suggests too little reflection on program improvement.

TEXTBOOKS

The NCTQ says:

"4. Textbooks galore. Perhaps no other feature exemplifies the chaotic nature of teacher preparation than the number of textbooks used to teach the same content matter in courses taught across the state. While most fields of study adopt a few standard, seminal texts for teaching students the basic foundational principles of the discipline, that’s not the case here. We counted no fewer than 256 textbooks used in 198 courses we evaluated for reading instruction. The most commonly required books are used in no more than six courses, with 71 percent of the texts used in only one course. One might conjecture that there are that many great reading textbooks out there. But of the 256 reading textbooks in Texas, only 17 were deemed to be adequate core textbooks by literacy experts, meaning that they accurately and

thoroughly cover all five components of effective reading instruction. In fact, we found only one program that steered entirely clear of textbooks that contained errors or important omissions on how to teach reading."

RTWT