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Publications by Beatriz Chu Clewell on Performance Evaluations

This report presents the cumulative findings from the six-year evaluation of the Pathways to Teaching Careers Program supported by the DeWitt Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund. The report is organized into five sections. The introduction situates the Pathways program within the current policy context and provides an overview of the Pathways initiative. Section 2 describes the evaluation methods. Section 3 describes program outcomes. Section 4 highlights Pathways strategies that proved successful in recruiting new candidates into teacher education, preparing them for teaching, and supporting them through program completion and the attainment of teacher certification. The final section gives the conclusions of the evaluation as well as the implications for policy that can be drawn from the study.

[Washington Times] As the Senate inches toward closure on the education overhaul bill set in motion by President Bush's proposals, Republicans and Democrats have sidestepped a critical issue - getting more and better teachers into the classroom. The debates over testing, vouchers and state vs. federal control have overshadowed the need to remedy the national teacher shortage and to improve teacher quality. Unless both sides of this dilemma get immediate attention, the likely payoff for other educational reforms in the bill will be greatly diminished.

Poor, high-minority urban schools, in particular, currently suffer critical shortages of teachers as a result of high turnover and the reluctance of teachers to take jobs in such schools. Aggravating the complexity of this problem, students of color are expected to constitute a majority of all K-12 students in the United States by 2035. Yet almost 90 percent of the current teaching force is white, a proportion not expected to diminish significantly in the near future.