At Arizona State University, education majors are studying less education than they used to.
Students in the college of education are taking more courses in the subjects they intend to teach. The law-school dean is writing a civics curriculum for aspiring elementary-school teachers; university scientists have created a science program. It’s a universitywide effort to make teacher training more rigorous and effective, one financed in part by a new $33.8-million grant from the U.S. Education Department.
The Obama administration has not yet provided specifics on all the changes it plans to seek during debate expected this year over No Child Left Behind, the federal law that governs elementary and secondary education and is due for a renewal. But President Obama’s budget for the 2011 fiscal year, along with programs the administration already has in place and remarks Education Secretary Arne Duncan has made, indicates that the administration might seek to make teachers’ colleges across the nation more like the one Arizona State is remaking.
Most changes in the law, which Education Department officials have begun calling by its former name—the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, what it was called before President George W. Bush’s administration—would have little effect on higher education. But teachers’ colleges are closely watching several issues that could become part of the discussion, including a proposal already made in the administration’s budget that would put schools of education in direct competition with alternative-certification programs like Teach for America when seeking federal grants.
Mr. Obama’s proposed Education Department budget provides a broad sketch of how he might like to change the law, including by expanding competitive grant programs for states and school districts that seek to transform their schools and advocating merit pay for teachers.
The president would also increase the money available for teacher preparation, from $136-million to $405-million. But doing so involves a move that has drawn criticism from the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education. Mr. Obama proposed consolidating several grant programs that give money to traditional teacher-preparation pipelines, including universities, and to programs like Teach for America that bypass traditional certification routes. The association said the plan plays down the role teachers’ colleges could play in pressing for change and leading improvements in teacher quality.
The administration will seek to study and spread successful teacher-training programs, whether they are run by universities or by alternative programs, Justin Hamilton, a press secretary for the Education Department, wrote in an e-mail message. Mr. Duncan has said that quality programs emphasize the importance of learning subject matter, help teachers use data to track students’ improvements, and give aspiring teachers substantial well-supervised experience, Mr. Hamilton said.
The lowest-performing programs will be encouraged “to improve or shut down,” he added.
The money for teacher preparation is a small part of the education act. But teacher-quality issues have been a point of contention in past debates over the law, said Kevin Carey, policy director of Education Sector, a nonpartisan research organization. Since No Child Left Behind was signed into law, in 2002, awareness of the importance of teacher quality has increased, Mr. Carey said, a change that became obvious three years ago, when Congress started to debate renewing the act but ultimately did not pass any legislation to change it.
“The biggest debates were actually not around the testing and the standards part,” he said. “They were around the teacher-quality provision,” including a proposal to include merit pay.
Neither the Obama administration nor Congress has provided details of the legislation they will advocate to renew the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. But as the Education Department prepares to propose its revisions, the debate on how much teachers should be taught about pedagogy is expected to heat up.
‘Highly Qualified’ Teachers
The No Child Left Behind law enacted during the Bush administration requires states to ensure that teachers are “highly qualified,” meaning that they must have a bachelor’s degree, state teaching credentials, and knowledge of the subjects they teach. But the law made little effort to change how teachers are trained or how such credentials are issued, said Timothy Knowles, a director of the Urban Education Institute at the University of Chicago.
“The law didn’t use the federal education investment to leverage changes in how we think about developing and supporting teachers,” Mr. Knowles said. “That was a missed opportunity, in my view.”
As a U.S. senator, Mr. Obama encouraged changes in teacher training when the Higher Education Act was renewed in 2008, Mr. Knowles said, beginning a “really important effort” to improve how teachers are taught.
Teachers’ colleges usually certify teachers by a route that includes classroom lessons on pedagogy and child development, as well as student-teaching experience. Programs like Teach for America and city-based teaching-fellows programs, which have expanded in recent years, attract students who majored in other subjects and train them to teach in only a few months, providing an alternative method of certification.
Many teachers’ colleges say that their emphasis on pedagogical methods is important and that alternative paths to certification do not adequately prepare teachers for the classroom. Alternative certification can have “very minimum qualifications,” said Beverly L. Young, assistant vice chancellor for teacher education and public-school programs at California State University. Teachers who are trained that way, she added, can easily become frustrated and leave the profession.
“It’s not enough to just go out and start teaching and not have any background or theory to base that on to understand why children learn the way they do and behave the way they do,” she said.
But some education experts say traditional certification has little to do with effective teaching.
“We have a teacher who got his doctorate and postdoctorate at a higher-education institution, speaks five languages, and is an absolutely superb teacher who doesn’t meet federal standards,” said Mr. Knowles, referring to an employee at a charter school run by the University of Chicago. “Making the assumption that teacher certification is a proxy for teacher quality is a dangerous one.”
The Obama administration has already made overtures to nontraditional certification paths and expressed interest in reforming traditional teachers’ colleges. Through the Teacher Quality Partnership, which received money from stimulus legislation passed last year, the Education Department gave $43-million in grants to both schools of education working to change their programs—including those at Arizona State and Ohio State University—and to “teacher residency” programs, modeled on medical residencies, that other universities were trying to establish.
At a speech at the University of Virginia in October, Secretary Duncan criticized colleges of education for training teachers with a method that was “theory-heavy and curriculum-light,” calling on universities to provide more hands-on training for students in their education schools and saying he hoped alternative-certification programs would continue to bring graduates from other fields into teaching.
His words angered faculty members and administrators at many teachers’ colleges, who said Mr. Duncan did not understand many of the programs they offer.
“I don’t think that Secretary Duncan has really experienced what kinds of innovative things schools of education do,” said Ms. Young. “Programs like Teach for America that focus on subject matter and not pedagogy really shortchange the teaching profession.” Teacher residencies have been around for years, she said, under a less glamorous name: student teaching.
Grants Reward Synthesis
The grants the Obama administration issued through the Teacher Quality Partnership had a heavy emphasis on creating teacher residencies, in which teachers are placed in schools with extensive mentor services and support and stay there for three years. The first 30 grants appeared to reward colleges of education that combined features of both alternative-certification programs and traditional teacher education, increasing subject-matter education for teachers while providing hands-on training beyond traditional student teaching.
For the next fiscal year, the Education Department wants to combine those Teacher Quality grants with several other grant programs, including ones designed to recruit teachers from fields other than education. If Mr. Obama’s budget is approved, the effect will be to have alternative-certification programs and schools of education competing against each other for federal funds.
Arizona State, which received the largest Teacher Quality Partnership grant last fall, seeks to create a synthesis of alternative certification and traditional teacher training. Program officials plan to examine Teach for America’s recruiting and selection strategies, require education students to take more classes in the liberal arts and sciences, extend student teaching to a yearlong program from a semester-long one, and create teacher-residency programs at elementary and secondary schools around the state, including some on American Indian reservations.
“Where there’s knowledge and expertise that lies outside of us, we need to look for our knowledge, and we need to embrace that,” said Mari E. Koerner, dean of the College of Teacher Education and Leadership at Arizona State. For a decade, the university had operated professional-development schools, partnerships with individual schools that gave teaching students experience. The federal funds, along with an $18-million private grant to work with Teach for America, gave the college an opportunity to expand and add to those programs.
Because Arizona has only three public universities, it is a unique place to test new ways to improve teacher quality and see results quickly, Ms. Koerner said.
“This is not a little boutique program that we’re experimenting with,” she said. “I think we can be a model for colleges of education for the kind of research, the kind of practice, the kind of data collection that I think colleges of education in the 21st century need to have.”
