Pathways to Teaching

Teacher preparation programs have long been criticized for offering too much theory and not enough practice, reflecting the culture of the university rather than the schools where teachers go to work. Teachers often say they felt unprepared for what they faced on their first day. But training that skips the theory to shorten preparation time has its own pitfalls. It tends to lead to high teacher attrition rates by recruits who were never steeped in the academic world of education.

Leaders in the field say that teacher preparation programs should learn from both experiences. Schools of education should shift their focus to do much more “clinical” work — hands-on, school-based training similar to medical internships. But this should occur while trainees are still students in education schools, where they can practice and learn under the guidance of seasoned academics and practitioners.

“The education of teachers in the United States needs to be turned upside down,” a blue ribbon panel of the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education wrote in its 2010 report, “Transforming Teacher Education through Clinical Practice.” “To prepare effective teachers for 21st century classrooms, teacher education must shift away from a norm which emphasizes academic preparation and course work loosely linked to school-based experiences. Rather, it must move to programs that are fully grounded in clinical practice and interwoven with academic content and professional courses.”

The panel’s report reflects the consensus of the nation’s leading superintendents, education deans and policy makers, but the preparation programs it calls for are a long way from the reality of most schools of education. Unlike many countries that have a national system of teacher preparation with extensive practice and mentoring, in the United States schools of education follow all sorts of different approaches and over the past 10 years various types of privately managed preparation programs have been allowed to fill the teaching ranks .

Among the pathways to teaching are alternative certification programs, such as New York City’s Teaching Fellows or the national Teach for America, which bypass the traditional certification route and allow novice teachers with as little as five weeks of training to be put in charge of classrooms. Both programs have brought thousands of teachers into the city schools. Nearly 9,000 Fellows and 500 Teach for America corps members make up about 12 percent of the current New York City teaching force.

In their 2005 study "Does Teacher Preparation Matter? Evidence about Teacher Certification, Teach for America, and Teacher Effectiveness," Stanford professor and education researcher Linda Darling-Hammond and her colleagues found that alternatively certified teachers were less effective and more likely to leave the profession. A Mathematica Policy Research study "The Effects of Teach for America on Students" released in 2004 found that Teach for America teachers outperformed traditionally certified teachers in math.

Whatever the case, alternative certification and traditional teacher preparation routes are now under an intense spotlight as districts and reformers press for new measures of teacher effectiveness to determine hiring, retention, pay and promotion decisions.

In this climate, more teacher educators are seeing the advantages of a coordinated national strategy to prepare and certify teachers for the classroom that includes but is not limited to hands-on, school-based training.

“Although successful policies in the 1970s eliminated shortages and contributed to the largest reduction in the achievement gap in our history, there is now no effective national policy to recruit, train, and distribute well-prepared teachers,” wrote Darling-Hammond in an Education Week Commentary on March 16, 2011. “Creating systems that address these needs — as the federal government has done in medicine — is key to our children’s future.”

Pathways to Teaching

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