Saturday the Chronicle ran a story about a new study out of Stanford that says teachers who come from traditional certification programs are better than teachers who come from untraditional programs. The study focused on HISD and Teach for America which provides some of HISD’s teachers, according to the Chronicle‘s story. Teach for America would be considered an untraditional program.
Something I found interesting is that if you go to the Stanford website, you can find the press release announcing the study, with the date April 15. The Chronicle story was posted late on April 15th. Things that make you go hmmmmm…
Here’s the beginning of the Chronicle‘s story:
Houston’s poor and minority students are increasingly less likely than their white and wealthier classmates to be taught by certified teachers with the necessary training, according to a study released Friday by Stanford University researchers.
The study, based on Houston Independent School District data from 1995-2002, found that students taught by uncertified educators from Teach for America and HISD’s Alternative Certification Program generally perform worse on standardized tests than those taught by certified teachers.
The researchers analyzed test scores for 55,000 third- through fifth-grade students and 4,400 teachers.
“It shows that you need to know what you’re doing to teach well and you need preparation to be effective,” said Linda Darling-Hammond, a Stanford professor who runs the university’s teacher education program. Once they become fully certified, Teach for America and other teachers trained through the Alternative Certification Program perform at about the same level as other certified teachers, Darling-Hammond said.
So we have a professor who runs a traditional teacher program (certified, probably) producing a study that is critical of untraditional teacher programs (uncertified). Is this like an anti-death penalty group producing a study about how death row killers may suffer while they are being given lethal injections? Or is it similar to abortion supporters producing a study showing that parental notification laws can cost $40 million in unplanned pregnancies?
Also, why does the study use data from 1995-2002? We can all find testing data (TAKS) from 2003 and 2004, and I am sure information about teachers would have been available for those years also. I don’t see why using old data is relevant today, when so many things in education have changed since 1995. (For example, if someone was rating the effectiveness of a hospital, would someone look at 10-year-old data to make a determination for today? Or have we made so much progress and so many advances that 10-year-old data is irrelevant?)
“I have serious questions based on everything I’ve heard from the research community on whether this study meets even ethical standards,” said Wendy Kopp, who founded Teach for America as a senior at Princeton University in 1989. “From what I have heard, disseminating this study at this point in its current form, before it’s been through a peer review, before the subjects of the study have been able to examine the results, is unethical.”
[snip]
The Stanford study doesn’t provide enough information for an outside analysis, said Dan Goldhaber, a University of Washington labor economist specializing in teacher labor markets and student achievement. Goldhaber also serves on the Teach for America advisory board.
“The way the information is presented is not standard,” he said. “If you were to submit this to an academic journal for review, they would demand more information about … the results than what is currently in the paper.”
[snip]
Darling-Hammond has been a long-time critic of Teach for America and President Bush’s No Child Left Behind legislation that mandates every classroom be taught by a “highly qualified” teacher by next school year.
The Stanford Daily also ran a story on the study and included this quote from Darling-Hammond:
While the typical Teach for America participant has a strong background in their field, is eager to help the kids advance and receives training the summer prior to the start of his or her first school-year, Darling-Hammond said this is not enough.
“They didn’t know what kids are supposed to learn in third grade,” she said. “They don’t know how to put a curriculum together. They didn’t know how to assess the student’s achievement.”
What in the world is Darling-Hammond talking about? School districts already have curriculum in place. New teachers don’t come into a school having to develop a curriculum, and certainly a district like HISD — with thousands of teachers — isn’t going to have individual teachers developing their own curricula. What a mish-mash education would be if that were the case!
No. What new teachers need and benefit from the most are mentors, or buddy teachers, to help them succeed.
Another factor in this whole equation is that poorer schools, generally speaking, do have more inexperienced teachers. Teachers with more experience will often work their way to better schools. (Yes. That goes against the idealistic world for which educational theorists yearn, but it is real life.) Therefore, poorer schools often struggle to attract and keep teachers, and will tend to have less-experienced teachers. The key to mitigating that is to have good mentoring/support programs in place for new teachers.
Maybe Darling-Hammond should work that angle into a study, instead of demonizing Teach for America.
We often hear pleas for people with real-life experience to become teachers. This Stanford study seeks to make those people look inferior to traditionally credentialed teachers, when the key to being a good teacher is far more than whether or not the person came from a traditional accreditation program.
KEVIN WHITED ADDS: Here’s a little snippet I found interesting:
Darling-Hammond has been a long-time critic of Teach for America and President Bush’s No Child Left Behind legislation that mandates every classroom be taught by a “highly qualified” teacher by next school year.
Indeed, Professor Darling-Hammond has. She’s also been a donator to various left-wing causes in recent years, dropping about $3,300 to Dean for America, Move On, and DNC Services Corporation/Democratic National Committee, according to FEC reports.
Anne is right to call attention to this press-release journalism. I’ll go one step further, and suggest that some sympathetic editor at the Chronicle received early notice of this press release, and put the hapless Jason Spencer onto a story that he didn’t have time to cover properly. Indeed, I doubt he even had time to read the study carefully. From Spencer’s quote, it appears nobody at HISD — the people with the most interest in responding — had time to read and respond to the study before an editor’s deadline for Spencer’s story.
But that’s just my speculation. Anyone at the Chronicle who would like to enlighten us is welcome to drop us an email and explain this process.
