Susan Brown, Urban Institute Director of Public Affairs:
"Good morning. I'm Susan Brown. I'm director of public affairs here at the
Urban Institute. I'm standing in place for Robert Reischauer, who is president
of the Urban Institute and unfortunately can't be with us today because he is
at a memorial service for a close friend of his, and a close friend of the
Urban Institute's, Peter Milius, who was an editorial writer for the Washington
Post.
Today, we are going to examine a really critical issue, teacher shortages in the
United States, and the forum that we are holding is on ending that shortage.
We're going to look at solutions to this problem from a number of perspectives,
and highlight the findings from a six-and-a-half year Urban Institute
evaluation of an innovative recruitment program that offers a promising way to
end this shortage.
The program is known as the Wallace-Reader's Digest Funds' Pathways to Teaching
Careers Program. It is run in 23 states, and involves 40 partnerships with
colleges and universities. Our evaluation of this program shows that it is a
model for recruiting and preparing new teachers that has been highly successful
on a number of different dimensions: in terms of the number of people
recruited, the program completion rates, the placement and retention in
teaching and high-need areas, and the ability to prepare extremely effective
teachers.
We think it provides a good model for replication by school districts across the
country, and after our discussion I think you will understand why.
You have, in your packets, bios of the presenters today. But let me just introduce
them to you. Dr. Toni Clewell will
moderate the discussion, provide you with a description of the problem of
teacher shortages, and highlight the evaluation findings. Dr. Clewell is
principal research associate in the Urban Institute's Education Policy Center.
She is co-principal investigator of the Urban Institute Evaluation, along with
Ana Maria Villegas, who unfortunately could not join us because she is sick
today, like many others of us.
Christine DeVita is president of the
Wallace-Reader's Digest Funds, two private charitable foundations established
by the founders of the Reader's Digest. Christine will give us some explanation
of how this program began, some of the program components, and why it is such
an important endeavor of the Funds.
Dr. Evelyn Dandy is a professor of education and director of the
Armstrong Atlantic State University's Pathways to Teaching Program. Evelyn will
tell us what it is like to run a Pathways program, the selection process, and
the importance of mentoring applicants as they go through the process.
Jannis Glover is a sixth-grade teacher
at Mercer Middle School in Savannah, Georgia. She began her career as a
paraprofessional, and later became a Wallace Funds Pathways to Teaching
scholar, and she will share with us what the program has meant to her both
professionally and personally.
And David Imig is president and chief
executive officer of the American Association of Colleges for Teacher
Education. David will relate the findings and their policy implications to the
No Child Left Behind Act and other legislative initiatives having to do with
teacher recruitment and training programs.
After each of the panelists provides opening comments, we will then turn the forum
over to the audience for questions. Before you ask your questions, would you
please wait for a microphone, and when you have a microphone, identify
yourselves and your affiliation before asking your question."
Toni Clewell: "Thanks, Susan.
Good afternoon. Welcome to an historic occasion. This is the Urban Institute's First
Second Tuesday. I trust that by next month we will have gone back to the First
Tuesdays.
As Susan just mentioned, we'll be talking about the impending teacher shortage,
which, although we refer to it constantly as impending, has actually arrived
already in some of our largest urban school districts. According to the
National Center for Education Statistics, over the next eight years, our
schools will need between 1.5 and 2 million new teachers. The No Child Left
Behind Act recently signed into law by the president acknowledges this fact by
providing funding to recruit and retain high quality teachers in public
schools.
The growing demand for new teachers is attributed largely to two converging
demographic trends. On the one hand, K-12 student enrollments are expected to
grow substantially in the years to come. As this happens, large number of
teachers who were hired during the baby boom enrollment years will be reaching
retirement age. Exacerbating the attrition problem is the increased
dissatisfaction with the teaching profession — and this has been caused by poor
school conditions, lack of administrative support, low salaries, and increased
bureaucratic demands. We've all heard about this; there are high dropout rates
for teachers. And to complicate matters further, as if the other situation were
not bad enough, recent policies to reduce maximum class size will create
additional demands for teachers, especially in the early grades.
Many school systems, as I mentioned before, are already experiencing difficulties in
filling teacher vacancies, and these shortages are particularly acute in urban
and rural schools in the fields of bilingual education, special education, and
in the subject areas of math and science. In addition, the growing
racial/ethnic imbalance between the student population and the teaching force
suggests that the shortage of teachers of color also exists. While students of
color make up a little more than one-third of the total enrollments, teachers
of color make up a little over 10 percent of the teaching force.
So, what are districts and schools doing about this? Well, teacher shortages are
problematic because they present a serious threat to the quality of education
that children receive in schools. When the supply of teachers is scarce, school
systems cannot be selective in their hiring. Worse yet, when faced with large
numbers of teacher vacancies, districts often resort to undesirable practices,
such as assigning teachers to classes in fields for which they're not prepared
to teach, or hiring teachers who lack the appropriate teacher certification.
And while the response to teacher shortage has been somewhat slow, there have
been a variety of policies intended to address the current and projected school
staffing challenges. These are in place in some states and local districts.
Some of the policies aimed to control the exodus of the older, experienced teachers
are creating incentives to keep teachers in schools beyond their retirement
age. And another set of policies call for the expanding of recruitment efforts
to include nontraditional pools. These are pools of teachers that come from
other areas that are not the traditional teacher education pools, such as
paraprofessionals or paraeducators, teacher aides; people who have been in the
workforce already in an area outside of education, so career changers; and
retiring military personnel.
The Pathways to Teaching Careers Program, which will we be talking about today,
exemplifies this last policy approach, and Christine DeVita, who is president
of the Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund, will now describe the thinking that led to
the creation of the Pathways Initiative.
Christine."
Christine DeVita: "Thank you.
I want to begin by expressing our great appreciation for the tremendous effort
and scholarship that Toni and Ana Maria have put into this Pathways study. And
we at the Wallace Funds are absolutely delighted that the Urban Institute
thought the issue was important enough to dedicate this forum to that issue.
As
you all know, shortages of high-quality teachers, particularly in high-need
schools, is not a new issue. Many of our lowest-performing schools are plagued
with high teacher turnover and a great number of noncertified teachers. So
often the kids who need good teachers the most don't get them. As we considered
this problem in the late 1980s, we wondered if perhaps part of the answer was
to look for teacher candidates from nontraditional sources. Was there another
pipeline that could be found that would identify good teaching candidates who
were already committed to the high-need schools and the kids that they served?
We
found two such pipelines. One was returning Peace Corps volunteers, who had
already demonstrated by their choices a commitment to service, and whose work
abroad had already put them in situations of working in high need. The other
was the noncertified teachers and paraprofessionals already working in those high-need
schools.
The
program was designed carefully, we thought, and eventually involved, as Toni
said, 40 sites in 23 states. At each site, certain things happened across the
board. First, there was a partnership that was created between the school
district that was actually employing these paraprofessionals and noncertified
teachers, and the university that was in the business of training them to
become good teaching candidates. The school district identified the areas where
they were experiencing teaching shortages so the new teachers could be prepared
in the subject areas the school districts needed most, thus increasing the
employment potential upon program completion.
Candidates
went through a very rigorous selection process and received scholarships that
enabled them to complete their studies and gain certification. And finally, the
university itself provided an innovative but rigorous teacher education
curriculum, as well as other support services for these candidates as they
progressed through their studies.
Then
the $64,000 question was, so what? Does this work? Will these folks become good
teachers? Are they going to remain in the teaching profession? And, most
importantly, will they stay in the schools that really need them? Is the model
affordable?
Those
are the questions that we hope to learn from the Pathways study conducted by
the Urban Institute, and the answers to those questions are what we're here to
share today.
For
that, I'll turn the discussion back to Toni, who has spent six-and-a-half years
trying to find the answers to those questions."
Toni Clewell: "Well, they were
six-and-a-half really well-spent years, and actually difficult years as well.
But I think we do have some answers to share with you.
I'm
going to phrase my presentation of the findings in terms of our study
questions. Our first study question was, did the Pathways program meet its
overall recruitment goals?
And,
as we can see from the overhead (view charts used in
presentation), actually the Pathways program exceeded its overall
recruitment goal by 18 percent. The original targeted recruitment goal was
2,200, and the actual recruitment was about 2,600. Something else that the
Pathways program accomplished was it increased the diversity of the new teacher
pool by increasing the number of potential minority teachers by 15 percent. As
I think I mentioned before, the minority representation of teachers is 13
percent, so you can see the minority participation of Pathways teachers was 63
percent, so that is a great increase.
Also,
there was one area that Pathways was not successful in terms of increasing
representation, and that was males. Probably a secondary goal was to increase
the number of males, and 30 percent of Pathways participants were males, compared
to 26 percent in the general population of teaching pool.
The
second study question was, have Pathways participants remained in the program
through certification?
As
we can see from the overhead, they experience a completion rate of 75 percent.
So 75 percent of all Pathways participants, at the time that we aggregated the
data, had completed all requirements for certification. That actually left 7
percent still in the pipeline, so it's possible that that number, that
completion rate, will go up. Eighteen percent dropped out, so there is an 18
percent dropout rate. When we compare this to the 60 percent completion rate of
traditional teacher education students, we see that it certainly exceeded that
60 percent completion rate.
Another
question was, we wanted to know whether Pathways participants, once they
completed the program, actually went in and worked in the high-need districts
that were targeted by their programs.
As
you can see from the overhead, 84 percent of them went right into the targeted
high-need areas that were targeted by the Pathways programs, and that's a
very high percentage.
Additionally,
for those who went into nontargeted school districts, over half of them went
into urban schools, and a little over one-quarter were in rural schools. So you
only have about 20 percent going into the suburban schools.
Another
question was, are Pathways graduates good teachers, and that is always the
ultimate question. One of the ways we tried to get at this was by surveying the
supervisors and principals of Pathways graduates who had been in teaching for
three years. Once they were out, certified, and in the classroom for three
years, we surveyed their supervisors and principals, and we asked them to rate
these graduates in four areas and compare them to the typical novice teachers,
or the typical beginning teachers, in their schools. The four areas were
organizing content knowledge for student teaching, creating an environment for
student learning, teaching for student learning, and professionalism. And these
are four areas that are pretty common in terms of rating teachers.
But
we found, as you can see from the data, that Pathways graduates were
consistently rated higher than the typical novice teachers in their schools,
and the difference was significant at the .0001 level.
The
fifth question was, once the Pathways graduates complete the program and go
into high-need areas, do they stay in teaching?
We
found that — and we also wanted to know if they stayed in teaching longer than
the typical novice teacher. We found that 81 percent of Pathways completers who
were in teaching remained in teaching for at least three years. Of these 81
percent, 8 [percent] left after three years. However, when we compare it to the
national rate — retention rate — of novice teachers who remain in teaching over a
three-year period, that's 71 percent. So Pathways graduates and teachers
definitely stayed in teaching longer than the typical novice teacher.
One
thing I should mention — the data are not here — but paraprofessionals in the group
actually had a 90 percent retention rate, and I think perhaps Evelyn Dandy
might want to talk about that a little bit. Some of the findings for
paraprofessionals were definitely even higher than the ones that we're
presenting now, but because we're doing the knowledge over the three types of
participants, it lowers it. But paraprofessionals, for example, did stay in
teaching — over 90 percent of them are still in teaching — and they tended to be in
urban, high-need schools at a greater rate than the other two groups.
So,
given these very positive findings, what are some of the policy implications
that we can draw from these findings?
Well,
certainly one of the things that the study has shown us is that recruiting new
teachers from nontraditional sources is an effective way of increasing the
national supply of teachers. It's not going to solve the whole problem, but it
will go a ways towards doing that.
It
shows us that there's a pretty large pool of nontraditional individuals out there
who have both the desire and the ability to become effective teachers for both
urban and rural high-need areas. Federal, state, and local policies, therefore,
should support programs that recruit from nontraditional pools as a way of
increasing both the numbers of teachers for high-need areas, and the diversity
of the teaching pool.
A
second implication from our findings is that paraprofessionals are a rich
source of potential teachers. This was a big surprise to us. We did not expect
to have them do that well, as well as they did. If they're selected carefully
and given appropriate support, as they were in Pathways, paraeducators are as
likely as other nontraditionals to complete a teacher education program and
become effective educators, and two additional benefits are accrued from
recruiting paraprofessionals. One, they're more likely to teach and to remain
in teaching in high-need areas, and second, they're also more likely to be
members of racial/ethnic minority groups. So federal, state, and local teacher
recruitment initiatives should make a serious effort to include
paraprofessionals in their efforts. [Paraprofessionals'] greater likelihood of
remaining in teaching in high-need areas more than offsets the higher cost of
preparing them for certification.
A
third implication of our findings is that the Pathways model, which provides a
program of preparation and support specifically tailored to nontraditional
groups that are being served, is an effective and affordable way — and we haven't
talked too much about affordability — but it's an effective and affordable way to
increase the size and diversity of the teaching force. I would characterize it
as an alternate route to teacher preparation and certification, rather than an
alternative certification program. It's not an alternative certification
program, because participants really do have to go through and fulfill all the
requirements that all other teachers or teacher education students do.
This
program, with outcome data to substantiate its effectiveness, merits wide
replication on national, state, and local levels. We've already seen the
federal government did provide funding to replicate Pathways in some areas. A
small amount of funding, not a lot.
Our
last implication that we can draw from these findings is that recruiting more
candidates from racial/ethnic minorities into teaching can help stabilize the
teaching force in urban school districts. If selected carefully, enrolled in
teacher education programs that work in partnership with high-need districts,
and given appropriate preparation, candidates from these racial/ethnic minority
groups are likely to choose to teach in settings that are urban and high need,
and to stay in their jobs longer than the average teacher. So federal, state,
and local initiatives that are designed to improve the conditions of urban
schools should give serious thought to working with and recruiting teachers of
color.
This
concludes the presentation of the findings. And now we will have Evelyn Dandy,
who will describe what it's like to be a Pathways program director, and [who
is] someone who implements strategies that actually resulted in these findings.
She was actually where the rubber meets the road, so to speak.
So,
Evelyn."
Evelyn Dandy: "Thank you, Toni. And
thanks to the DeWitt Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund. This Pathways to Teaching
Careers Program has been a godsend to Armstrong Atlantic State University. It's
just one of an example of 40 other programs around the nation that use the very
same components, very much the same components. The program recruits, selects,
screens, trains, supports, collaborates on placement, and then provides
induction services for noncertified school district personnel — that is,
paraprofessionals, paraeducators, teacher assistants, substitute teachers,
secretaries, cafeteria managers — who have already demonstrated excellent work
records in the school district, and they all maintain a commitment to return to
that school community once they've completed their certification requirements.
The
program is a partnership, a collaborative, that unites school district
personnel, and university personnel into an advisory committee that governs the
selection, the training, the subsequent placement of certified teachers; in our
case, it was primarily minorities, African Americans. We have a strategic
screening process that has selected only 1 in 10 — we've had over 1,000
inquiries, but we've only brought in 108 scholars, we call them — in a
three-tiered application process that includes a preliminary essay,
recommendations from supervisors and other teachers in the school, and an
on-campus interview that includes additional essays, oral readings, and posing
solutions to hypothetical educational problems.
The
significant feature of the program, and one of the most significant features of
the program, is the support that it provides for the students as they go
through the traditional university teacher education program. We provide 80
percent tuition scholarships. We purchase textbooks, [whose prices] you
probably know are escalating these days. We provide advisement tutorials,
networking among the scholars, who really are like a family. We put them into
cohorts, so they can help one another and work with one another, as one of the
scholars is going to tell you in just a few minutes.
We
provide workshops for them on how to move from being a paraprofessional to
being a professional. And in turn, they must contract — they sign a contract to
maintain a certain grade point average, to attend all the program activities,
and to teach in the local high-need schools for at least three years following
their earning a certification, or they have to pay us our money back.
As
a result of the program and support, we've been able to document significant
gains, as you will see. You have a handout in your folder, and I do believe you
have a transparency on this. We've been able to document significant gains in
grade point average from the time they enter the program until the time they
achieve certification. As you will see from that handout, you will see the
entering GPA is marked in red, and near the bottom you see we have about 71
graduates, so those are the numbers of scholars, and the GPA then is listed
along the left side. And you will see that this chart represents their growth
in GPA according to the kind of support that we've been able to offer them.
Forty-five percent of our graduates exit with a 3.0 or higher, and that is
indeed impressive for a group of scholars, African Americans, who are going
through a rigorous teacher education program at a predominantly white
institution.
As
of December 2001, we've had 71 scholars graduate from our program. Their
composite GPA is a 2.98 in a 4.0 system. Forty-five percent of the graduates,
as I said before, exit with a GPA of 3.0 or higher, and 65 percent of all the
grades that have been earned by our scholars are either As or Bs. We have a
profile handout for you that you probably received as you walked in the door.
You might look at some of the statistics from our program at a later time.
As
teachers, the scholars clearly distinguished themselves as leaders. Of the 66
who were certified and placed in classes as of last December, 61 have remained
in teaching, and this represents a 92 percent retention rate. Sixteen have won
their school's nomination for teacher of the year, 11 have earned their masters
degree, and 2 are doctoral candidates. Eight have earned statewide InTech
computer endorsement, seven have earned certification and now mentor student
teachers and practicum students in their classes, and seven have earned
statewide reading endorsements.
The
Pathways program has been a recipient of university system awards in teaching
excellence and in student retention. We've been featured on National Public
Radio, CBS Radio, and World News Tonight with Peter Jennings. The program has
been the subject of a 30-minute documentary done by NEA, and it has appeared on
the Learning Channel in their School Stories series. We've won Harvard
University's Innovations in American Government award. That has certainly
opened doors for us, and enabled us to disseminate the program and enabled me
to travel around the country to talk about the program, and enabled me to help
others, other institutions, replicate our program.
We've
also been recipients of the United States Department of Education's teacher
quality grant, which has enabled us to replicate the program in three
neighboring rural school districts that have serious needs for teachers,
minority teachers, minority males too. And numerous school districts around the
country have replicated our program — not just the program that I direct, but
other Pathways programs. And of course, individual scholars have distinguished
themselves as outstanding educators.
Elijah
West has provided testimony about the program before a congressional committee.
Lisa Moore has won the 2000 Phi Delta Kappa International Excellence in Student
Teaching Award, and she was supervised in her student teaching by Leslie
Taylor, a scholar who graduated from our program, and of course Leslie Taylor
appears on the Internet on a program called TeachScape, for professional
development for teachers, and her teaching of reading is provided on the
Internet. Bill Harris now is teaching at Armstrong, in the InTech program.
Sylvester Genn teaches part-time courses at South University.
The
Pathways to Teaching program model has really been a godsend to Armstrong, to
Chatham County, to the many scholars whose lives it really has changed, and of
course to the children — and that's the bottom line — to the children that they
have taught.
We
have one of the scholars here as a primary example, Mrs. Jannis Glover, who
will tell you of her experience in the Pathways program. Now, I've asked her to
do something she normally doesn't do, and that is brag about her
accomplishments. So if she seems a little uncomfortable doing so, please
forgive her, but I told her you have to let the people know what you've been
able to do.
This is Jannis Glover."
Jannis Glover: "Thank you, Dr. Dandy,
and thank you to the Urban Institute for allowing me to share with you a small
portion of what it has meant to be a Pathways scholar. I became involved in the
Armstrong Pathways to Teaching program because I wanted to make a difference in
the lives of children. This desire developed as I was a paraprofessional in the
Savannah-Chatham County public schools. I became keenly aware that teaching
really does touch the lives of children forever, and I wanted to be an agent of
change for these children.
I
had the desire to go back to college, but not the means. Family and financial
responsibilities loomed as barriers to my returning to school and completing a
degree. The Pathways initiative at Armstrong came as an answer to my prayer.
While a scholar, I dared to dream dreams. I was challenged to dare to be
different, to be innovative and effective in meeting the needs of culturally
diverse urban students. Under the expert, and I would say divinely inspired,
guidance of Dr. Evelyn Dandy, I was nurtured academically, spiritually
motivated, and given the support to complete my degree. I graduated in 1997
with a 3.76 grade point average.
One
of the most significant developments as a scholar was the evolution of close
bonds and camaraderie between myself and other scholars in the program. We
established a network of support while we labored with classwork and with
balancing our personal lives while attending classes. The network is still
functioning, as it is not uncommon for any of us to call upon each other for
assistance, whether it is advice for the classroom, or a shoulder to cry on
when the increasing difficulties of teaching children loom before us.
Since
completing my degree, my life has changed drastically for the better. I want to
share with you just a few things that have happened to me. I was awarded the
Savannah-Chatham County Sally Mae First Class Teacher Award in my first year of
teaching. I, and many other scholars, have been nominated by our schools as
teacher of the year. I was nominated three years in a row. I presented at an
international conference on reading in Stavanger, Norway, and the paper I
presented was published in Literacy Challenges for the New Millennium, which is a publication of the 11th European Conference on Reading. I've co-chaired two national conferences of Pathways scholars. More recently, I've been asked to be a part of an advisory
board for the national Pathways alumni group.
I
guess, most significantly to me, is that I have been, since 1998, enrolled in
the Breadloaf School of English Graduates summer program, and have had an
opportunity to study primarily at Lincoln College, Oxford, England, where I
will receive my masters degree this August. Near and dear to me also is my
nomination to participate in the Disney American Teacher Award program last
year. And this nomination was most dear to me because a former student named me
to participate in this prestigious competition. And that indicated to me, as so
rarely happens to teachers, that I had indeed made a difference in this
student's life.
Finally,
this fall I will be pursuing my doctorate degree in English. I want to tell you
a little bit now about what this has meant to the students in my classroom.
Students who have been taught by me still come back to my classroom. It is not
uncommon for me to have to put them out so that I can teach my current
students. Another student — I will say, when we talk about standardized testing,
they showed tremendous growth. I had a student one year who came to me scoring
at the 11th percentile in reading comprehension on her fifth-grade Iowa Test of
Basic Skills. After completing her sixth-grade year in my class, her scores
were at the 30th percentile, which shows a tremendous gain over a one-year
period.
This
is just a brief picture of what it's like. I don't know if I have enough time
left, but I wanted to share with you a poem that I wrote about what it was like
to be a scholar. And if I have the time I will do that now.
Every
scholar has a story to tell of struggles and pain, joy and sadness, while
pursuing degrees from colleges and universities that sometimes present walls
and mountains, glass ceilings to shatter, to extend our reach for a sheepskin
degree.
Every
scholar has a story to tell of broken marriages that succumb to pressures, of
all-night studying, never-ending homework, and fighting to balance their home
and school, trying to prevent neglect of their children, husbands, their wives,
friends, and families.
Every
scholar has a story to tell of searching for money to pay increasing tuition,
and bills that are long overdue, and praying to keep the lights on so they can
study, gas for the car to make it to class.
Every
scholar has a story to tell of the mothers, the fathers, sisters, and brothers
who will never see them march to "Pomp and Circumstance," adorned in regal
black, the scholar's first goal.
Every
scholar has a story to tell of meeting new friends with the same great common
goal, to become superior molders and shapers of the minds of our young.
Every
scholar has a story to tell of successes, great joy, and, yes, great love for
the doctors and teachers who guide them, who keep pushing and encouraging them
to develop and maintain high standards of excellence.
Every
scholar has a story to tell of their love and gratitude for the Pathways
program, the greatest, most rewarding, powerful agent of change that turned,
and continues to turn, their lives and their dreams to the stars.
Every
scholar has a story to tell.
Thank you."
Toni Clewell: "Our next speaker is
David Imig, from the American Association of Colleges and Teacher Education,
who will now talk about some of the lessons learned from the findings and who
will kind of relate the findings to federal policies."
David Imig: "I welcome the opportunity,
but I'd like to hear some more poetry. That was very inspirational, far more so
than what I'm about to say.
First
of all, I want to praise the Wallace Fund for this initiative. I think that
what the Wallaces had the courage to do is to build a capacity in 40
institutions that now can be replicated across the country to respond to an
enduring need that this country experiences. It enabled schools of education to
strengthen preparation programs; it enabled those programs to refocus on
diversity aspects, and to build culturally responsive programs; and it enabled
those schools of education to track and support recent graduates, and to
support induction programs for people. It is a significant investment, and it
is one that needs to be highlighted. It needs to be highlighted in the context
of what is happening in the policy community in this town.
I
think there is a recognition now on the part of both the political right and
the political left that teachers do make the difference; they make the critical
difference in the learning of children. There is a consensus, from the Urban
Institute to the Education Trust to the Fordham Foundation, that we need to
invest in teaching and in teachers, and that we need to find ways to attract
more — and more able — teachers to the classrooms of America.
No
Child Left Behind has a number of messages for us, and if the authors are in
the room you can identify yourself afterwards. The most critical thing that is
in this bill is definitions of high-quality teachers and high-quality teaching.
The bill suggests that by 2005 we will have no emergency certificates in this
country, we will have no provisionally certified teachers, we will have no
permanent substitutes — that indeed we will have no paraprofessionals without at
least an associate of arts degree. The kinds of expectations that the Congress
has written for us are extraordinary, and the need to transform the way that we
prepare teachers, the way that we serve teachers, the way that we provide
professional development, is just enormous.
What
this act does is provide substantial resources to local education agencies
through Title I, to begin to define and then report on the quality of the
teacher workforce they employ. Title II of this piece of legislation
appropriates small amounts of money toward the end of transforming both
paraprofessionals and other teachers into high-performing or high-quality
teachers.
What
I think that this Pathways project holds for us is a set of models that school
superintendents and urban school boards can now replicate. And one of the
things that I am going to commend to my colleagues, both within the counsel of
chief state school officers and in the principals and superintendents group, is
that they begin to explore the Pathways model as a model to respond to the new
federal mandates, because indeed Pathways is a viable way, it is a viable
training model, and it needs to be looked at.
I'm
also going to encourage my congressional friends to look very seriously at
Title II of the Higher Education Act when it is up for re-authorization in
another year, because Sections 203 and 204 of that piece of legislation need to
be much more explicit about endorsing a Pathways model and providing more
capacity-building monies for schools of education to replicate or model what
Armstrong and 39 other programs have done.
I
think this is a commendable program. I once again congratulate Wallace for
doing it, and I commend the Urban Institute for this particular initiative. And
now back to the poetry, I hope."
Toni Clewell: "Thank you, David. I'd
like to add — David mentioned the need for replicating Pathways. I want to point
out that we did develop a guide for Pathways that will help districts and
schools who wish to replicate Pathways, and we provide a step-by-step guide or
blueprint to actually creating programs like these, and we also have a great
deal of cost information, which most programs do not have. It's very difficult
to get cost information. There is a cost study that was done by Jennifer King
Rice of the University of Maryland, and it's on our Web site, and it also is in
the last chapter of this document. I don't know if that's outside, but anyhow
this is available through the Urban Institute. So schools and districts who
want to replicate Pathways really have a lot of help provided by the
Wallace-Readers' Digest Fund. And they're that much ahead in doing it because
you have the blueprint and the cost information.
Now
I guess we can open this up for questions from the audience. I guess I will
moderate that. I'd like to repeat what Susan said, which is please wait until
you get a microphone, and also identify yourself and your affiliation.
I
see — yes, sir."
Karl Russo: "I'm with the U.S. Treasury
Department, and I have a question on two things. One, it looks like you tried
to address one of the issues of supply into this market for teachers and trying
to come up with additional ways of pulling people in. It seems that one issue
might be barriers to entry, in the fact that the traditional certification process
may keep people out of the system who might otherwise go in, especially people
who have established careers perhaps, who would work 20 years doing something
else, who might have the content information to be able to teach a class in,
say, mathematics or something like that, but might not have the teaching
courses. And perhaps — have you looked at any ways of trying to come up with an
alternate to the traditional certification process, or if you have looked at
that, what made the determining factor to decide to just pull people into
the traditional system through this alternative means?"
Toni Clewell: "Does anybody on the
panel want to address the first part of the question?"
Christine DeVita: "A great portion of
our applicants did already have a degree, they just didn't have the money to go
back to school. So we facilitated their entry into the program. They went
through the strategic screening process, and they did then sort of take an
alternative path, but within that alternative path was a traditional program.
There are certain courses that are required by the state that they must take.
And so, yes, I would say about 50 percent of our people already had a degree of
some kind. And they went through the program and they did just fine. Obviously
a person who has had more college experience will have an easier time going
through a teacher preparation program, because they're familiar with the
territory."
David Imig: "As many in this room are
aware, there's a mindset in town currently that suggests we can do away with
teacher certification, that there are other means or there are other vehicles
that we should be supporting. That again comes from a variety of sources, both
on the right and on the left. In a compulsory school system, such as we have in
this country, the state has certain minimums that it has to guarantee the
public and the citizens of a state, and one of them, I believe, is the quality
of teachers in those compulsory public schools.
Now,
what should be the criteria? Congress has said what those should be. You have
to have an academic degree. To teach in a secondary school, you have to pass a
state test and you have to be certified. For elementary teachers, you have to
have a range of subjects, and you have to have skill in teaching and in
assessing. Those are now state mandates that Armstrong and every other
institution in this country has to comply with.
What
is happening in schools of education, as is happening in a variety of
alternative routes to certification, is that there are all sorts of different
configurations, or different routes, or different ways of getting to that
certification level. In some places those programs have been condensed. The
most outrageous one I've heard is there is now a two-day program: "If you read
you can teach" I think is the message. But there is a balance, and what is that
balance is something I think states and state agencies and various people are
seeking right now.
The
National Association of State Boards of Education is seeking right now to put
together a panel that would try to come up with reasonable definitions of what,
in fact, a certification process might look like. Flexibility, getting more
people in, accommodating the needs of urban schools in particular, but also
rural schools, are goals that we have. I think this is an enormous challenge,
and it's a challenge that's going to continue to be there. But the one thing
that I wanted to make sure happens is that we provide a high-quality teacher
for every kid in every school in this country, starting on day one. No more
high school graduates teaching in our poorest schools in the name of
substitutes or whatever we call it. We have to have high-quality teachers, and
we collectively have to work to ensure that."
Toni Clewell: "Thank you. To answer the
second part of your question, as I mentioned, Jennifer Rice King did a cost
study that was pretty detailed, and I'll just quote from it. There's a low
estimate and a high estimate for noncertified and Peace Corps. For a public
institution, the low estimate to produce a teacher is $7,380; the high estimate
is $21,713. For a paraprofessional, which naturally is going to cost more
because they usually just have two years of college and they have to make up
that additional two years, the low estimate for a public institution is
$14,814, and the high estimate is $22,855. Okay. Now, that's available, you can
get it on the Web, and the total study, cost study, is on our Web site.
Jennifer
is here, by the way, I don't know if she wants to add anything."
Toni Clewell: "Let's see, Bob, I think you had your hand up, Bob Lerman."
Robert Lerman, Urban Institute: "It
seems like there were, as I see it, kind of three components: the selection,
the funding of the tuition and the school expenses, and then kind of the
service components which involved all this orientation and group support and so
on. And I wondered if Evelyn and maybe Bea could comment on which of those you
saw as most critical. I mean, isn't it the case that we do have some federal
funds that provide grants and loans for low- to –moderate-income people? And
then, finally, I wasn't quite clear on exactly how much time the different
people spent in the program to reach the certification."
Evelyn Dandy: "The amount of time
varies depending upon how much educational experience that they've had, number
one. For a B.A., probably a year and a half to two years, it would take for
them to complete the program. For an A.A. probably four, sometimes five years,
depending on whether they could go full-time or part-time. Now, for the
population that we're looking at, student loans are significant. A lot of times
these are midcareer people who already have their quota of loans in other
areas. Many times they can't afford another loan, or they don't have enough credit
to get a loan. So the financial part is significant.
But
in addition to that is the support that's provided to help them get through the
morass of advisement, registration, finding the right professor to go to,
finding the right support resources on campus, going through financial aid,
working with the bookstore. And what we did was we oriented people all over
campus in every service area on campus, the library, everywhere. We brought
them in, we told them what our program was all about. Now this is a predominantly
white campus that is bringing in African Americans, so the first idea was, are
they going to lower our standards? And so I had to assure them at every throw
that standards would not be lowered, that this program required standards to
it, and so forth. So I think the support is significant, both financial and
educational and emotional. I think that's probably the most significant thing
that we have in our program.
Of
course, the collaboration was important because you can prepare teachers, but
they might not be ready for the right subject area. So the close collaboration
that we had with the school district was significant because they could tell us
"We need a teacher in this school in this subject area," or "Here is a key
person who has a good background, just doesn't have the money to go to
college"—the principal would suggest a person. So we had members of the school
district then sit on our advisory committee, so that they then became a part of
the program, so that they would take ownership of the program. So that was key,
too. I just couldn't tell you which one is most significant. Every on of those
features — I mean, this model works. So every one of the features is essential."
Rachel Kelly, The Education Trust: "My
question is kind of confusing I think, but what I'm wondering is, if you're
going to adopt this model over the widespread educational system, in many
different institutions, you would need some sort of standardized curriculum for
teacher preparation, would you not? And, if so, how would you implement that
nationally? Do you see what I'm saying?"
David Imig: "The opportunity to build a
standardized curriculum across the country, in fact, is under way. We're doing
it in a variety of ways: Accreditation helps to serve that purpose, something
called the Interstate New Teacher Assessment and Support Consortium does that,
in terms of setting certain expectations for every program in the country, so
we're well along in the process of building a common curriculum that is, in
fact, offered.
What
Pathways does is, in some sense, take that rubric and then begin to suggest
that within a particular school of education, you will have a track for former
Peace Corps volunteers, you'll have a track for paraprofessionals, and so that
there are various programs within.
In
College Park, the last time I counted, there were something like 20 different
ways that you could become a teacher, some with this amount of credits, some
with that, some with certain or particular durations of time, but all intended
to facilitate the maximum attainment of the state expectations at the lowest
possible cost to the student, toward the end of ensuring a high-quality teacher
for every classroom. And if you want to talk more about it, I'll be happy to do
so."
Glenda Partee, American Youth Policy Forum:
"I appreciate your issues to impact the pipeline piece. My question has to do
with the conditions of the teaching profession once you get in there, which is
the other side of the coin. What do you do in the Pathways Program to prepare
the potential teacher for those conditions, and what do you do in the follow-up
piece to either mentor them or convey information to the district or the school
to help them?"
Christine DeVita: "Since we take our
people from noncertified school district personnel, they already know the
conditions that exist. They don't have any illusions about what teaching is all
about. And so what we do is, we develop a cohort, and we try to place at least
two scholars in each school. Whenever we place them, we try to put some of them
together so that they can provide support for one another. And then we train
our scholars who have graduated — Jannis can tell you we train our scholars.
Once you are in a Pathways program, you're in it for life. So we train our
scholars to mentor other teachers, so that those people who have gone through
the program then become mentors for the new people who are coming into the
program. The first three years of teaching are hard in many cases, I'll be
honest, and so we try to provide that different kind of support for the people
to keep them there. I think that's why our people stay, because they already
know what they're getting into."
Jannis Glover: "Let me just add a
little bit to that, if I may. Specifically, the Armstrong program provided so
much support that even now after five years from graduating, I'm always a
Pathway scholar. Assistance from anyone is only a phone call away. We still
have Armstrong professors who will come out and come into your room and provide
advice, or just provide any support that you possibly need, and it is because
of the reputation of the program within that college that they afford those
support models to us."
Glenda Partee:
"I appreciate what you're saying. I guess my
question had as much to do with what you said as with about how you prepare
them to change the conditions of education. What you've said to me is you've
prepared them to put up with it and go forward. But it seems like you're a
change agent here, and you have an opportunity to build in some kind of change
agent through your relationship with the district, and through your
relationship with the new teacher."
Evelyn Dandy: "One of the second rounds
of funding that we received from DeWitt Wallace was to be a leadership
institution, and in that leadership grant we received money to help our
scholars earn their master's degrees. And so we are taking them beyond the
bachelor's level. They are really becoming leaders now because they have earned
their master's degree, a lot of them are great group chairpersons. We have one
that's an assistant principal now. So we nurture them all the way through the
process, and just encourage them to go on and get higher degrees. And as they
get higher degrees, they're getting old but some of them are ready to move out
of the classroom and take administrative positions. And that's the way,
hopefully, we're going to really have them make a chance, when they become the
leaders."
Toni Clewell: "That gentleman over
there in the green shirt."
Steve Silver, Public Education Network: "I
just want to ask if you intend to or have collected data on the effect that
Pathways teachers have had on student achievement?"
Toni Clewell: "No, we have not. We
considered that, but as all of you know it would have taken probably a much
longer time; it probably would have doubled the period of the evaluation
because we'd have to wait for several years after people had completed their
program. So we have not collected data.
We
thought that looking at getting principals' ratings was a good substitute.
That's certainly been done by some very reputable researchers. Dick Murnain, for example, used that in his study of the New Haven teachers, and
there's a high correlation between principals' ratings of teachers and their
students' scores."
David Imig: "I'm sure that if Christine
wants to give the Urban Institute some more money to do this, in fact, it is
possible. In the state of Georgia, you now have a mandate that Armstrong, in
fact, has to track their students, and show, in fact, the performance gains by
teachers or their graduates.
Now,
as that gets played out in Georgia, that's going to be one of the first states
that's actually going to have that data. Whether you can disaggregate it back
to particular teachers and particular classrooms in its current form, I don't
know, but that's certainly where the state of Georgia is going. So it might be
interesting, if Christine would like to give you some more money to do it."
Christine DeVita: "Right. We're working
for that. But we have, early on, tried to look at the effect of attendance on
the scholars, and we've gotten some early data from a school district that says
that our scholars, if we compare them to regular teachers at that grade level,
their children seem to have a higher attendance rate."
Toni Clewell: "Well, anecdotally, we
actually went into each one of these programs and talked to principals who had
Pathways scholars teaching in their schools. More than one principal said to
me, "I can prove to you that the achievement scores of these kids are higher."
I didn't take them up on it."
Michele Titi, Peace Corps' Fellows USA Program: "By way of commentary about our program, I would just like to put in a plug and
say that when my colleague, Dr. Cary Ballou and I visit our sites and we talk
with the people in the school systems; as though they had been scripted,
whether they're in Prince George's County, Maryland, or in New York City, or
out on the Hopi Reservation in Arizona, their cry is, "Send us more, send us
more Peace Corps fellows as teachers."
But
I have a question that's not about Peace Corps fellows. I wondered, perhaps
from Dr. Clewell or Dr. Dandy, from your research or your experience, have you
any idea why the paraprofessionals stay in the high-need schools? What are some
of the factors? Did you learn any of the factors that keep them there?"
Toni Clewell: "I think we probably have some."
Christine DeVita: "They have roots in
the community. They know most of the parents of the children they teach.
They're motivated by the salary because it's almost triple [their original]
salary. I mean, most paras make $10,000 >
to $12,000 a year. In their first year of teaching, they may $26,000,
$30,000 a year. So they have a motivation there because they're improving
themselves. And they've been to the mountaintop; they already know what this
thing is all about. You know, a lot of them do have families, family members
who have been teachers, so it's sort of in their blood. And they demonstrate a
commitment. They have what is called resiliency. As you heard from the poem
that Jannis wrote, this is not an easy task: to go to school if you're a
paraprofessional. It's not easy to have family, a full-time job, and children,
and go to school and still maintain above a 3.0 GPA. So these people have
demonstrated their commitment."
Michele Titi: "I would also like to add, our returning Peace Corps volunteers
have other options, they have more options than paraprofessionals who are in a
community already and committed to that community have. So that probably
accounts for part of the reason."
Katherine Kravetz, American University:
"Could you provide a breakdown of how many of these teachers go to elementary
primary schools and how many go to secondary schools, because I would think at
the secondary level there might be other issues."
Toni Clewell: "I think most of them are
in elementary schools. I think we do have a breakdown. In the meantime, let's
see, I will look for that. And also, for example, the great majority of the
Peace Corps fellows tend to go into high school, whereas the people in the
other two types of participants tend to go into elementary school.
I
will look for it in the meantime — oh, here it is. Okay, I have it by race: 3
percent are in pre-K, 73 percent are in elementary, and 21 percent are in
secondary.
I
was told that there was as young man behind the pillar that I should call on."
Dewayne Morgan, University System of
Maryland: "Actually, my question piggybacks on the question that was just
asked. I'm particularly concerned about the issue of secondary education
recruitment. Are there strategies that you have noted in the report that
institutions aren't doing? Because I particularly know the situation in
Maryland, it's the secondary education that we really see the shortage, the
need for teachers in those shortage areas. So are there strategies that are
found in the Pathways model that we might address that particular sector?"
Toni Clewell:
"Well, I think probably by looking at the strategies that were
used by the Peace Corps fellows component of the program would be the ones you
would look for, because school districts that had shortages, for example, in
math or science, actually worked with programs that recruited Peace Corps
fellows who had math or science majors. So that is certainly something that is
a model that could be looked at, recruiting people and working with them,
people who have bachelor's degrees, or even higher degrees in those areas where
you have a shortage."
Frank Sobel, U.S. Department of Education:
"The program I am in is called Comprehensive School Reform, and it funds
schools to adopt models. Among the things that we've learned is that the
adoption of models tends to be a pick and choose among elements. Another thing
that we've learned is one person's model is another person's fiction, if you
will. So this is advice.
Your
booklet has categories of things to do. In pushing for larger trials of the
Pathways, it would be better to have, if you will, case studies that lay out
what the programs really are, because otherwise people will take them and say,
"I have a Pathways model," and Pathways people who know it will go in and say,
"But you're missing this, you're missing this, and you're missing this." So,
it's just a recommendation to maybe go to some of your sites and develop case
studies where they lay out in more particular detail what it is they do and how
it works."
Toni Clewell: "That's a very
interesting observation. Actually, we do have case studies of each of the
programs. We have not published them, but we do have in-depth case studies of
each program."
Nicole Vartanian, U.S. Department of Education:
"I have a comment and a question, and the comment is to just piggyback on the
question about student achievement data. I would just really encourage you to
pursue that funding for that piece, because I know in the strategic plan that
the department is about to finalize, their teacher quality piece has a lot to
do with student achievement and the programs that they're sort of excited about
have that connection made. So, I would encourage you to pursue that.
Secondly,
as a graduate of a traditional four-year teacher education program — actually,
Dr. Imig, at the University of Illinois — so I guess I'm very impressed with your
program, and certainly, again, the administration is very interested in
programs like this. I just happened to wonder if you, Dr. Imig, could speak to
what you think the implications are for colleges of education in trying to
maintain the presence that they've had and not sort of become marginalized in
the future?"
David Imig: "Talk to the person in
front of you; she can share Illinois stories with you.
I
think that the most exciting thing in my world is the fact that there are all
sorts of experiments underway. Armstrong would be a classic case of a
traditional institution that now has a laudable set of programs that they're
offering students: different lengths, different durations, different clinical
settings, different kinds of professors, different emphases, different kinds of
criteria. So that, as a pattern, is everywhere very common.
People
continue to characterize it as traditional versus alternative, but I always
like to point out that the first 250 FIPSI grants that were given to
alternative preparation programs; more than 200 of those were given to schools
of education, so that the largest source of alternative programs — and in fact
there are some people in this town who find this alarming — that most of the
alternative programs are currently housed within so-called traditional
[programs].
I
don't know what Illinois has—maybe Carolyn knows—but I know that at that
institution there is a very aggressive positioning of that program across a
range. I mean, there's a Peoria Program, there's a Chicago Program, there are
different kinds of models and variations of different duration. That's the way
that schools of education are responding. That's the only way we're going to
stay in the market."
Toni Clewell:
"We only have time for maybe one more question. Our time has run
away from us. Does anyone have a final question or comment?"
Maurice Williams, American Association of
State Colleges and Universities: "I just have one question to ask. I would like to know what is being
done to recruit more males in the teaching profession, particularly in
low-performing school districts?
And I guess the second question is, why is this such a problem?"
Toni Clewell: "Well, I'll tell you one
program that's doing very well in recruiting males, and that's Troops to
Teachers, because they recruit military personnel, retired or retiring military
personnel. The Peace Corps program was pretty good also in recruiting males.
But the reasons for that — teaching is traditionally a woman's occupation. I
don't know if Evelyn wants to comment on that."
Evelyn Dandy: "And the salary is prohibitive, you know. I mean, it's difficult
to raise a family and do all the things that a man has to do, I guess, on a
teacher's salary. And we've recruited — 25 percent of our people are males, and
we started out focusing on African-American males. When we had African-American
males apply to our program, regardless of what their GPA was, we tried to bring
them in. We tried to make every effort to bring them in and keep them in because
we know that that was the essential focus. And we have a strong cohort of men
who are in our program and who are leaders.
But,
after a while, I mean, they are working as coaches, and they have to find a way
to supplement the salary, the deplorable salary that teachers have."
Toni Clewell:
"Well, thank you very much for coming, and let's have a round of
applause for the participants."
(End of the Event)
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