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What's New at NCTR?
Tamara Azar, NCTR’s chief external relations officer, presented to lawmakers and policy leaders on how residencies are a better way to recruit, prepare and retain effective teachers. Tamara was one of several national experts invited to the Hunt-Kean Leadership Fellows convening in Seattle last month. The program immerses senior-level state political leaders in education policy discussions with the goal of helping them develop a “deeply rooted vision for educational improvement.”
When residency programs fail to capture a share of the savings they produce for their partner districts, they miss out on important funding that would help diversify their revenues and make programs less susceptible to shocks. From direct funding to “pay for success” agreements, our latest blog explains how districts can support their valuable residency partners.
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Partner Updates
New Visions for Public Schools has received a $14 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to increase postsecondary readiness and reduce disparities between black, Latino and low-income high school students and their peers in New York City high schools. The grant will support the creation of a network of high schools working on equitable postsecondary preparation. In the last five years, New Visions has helped partner schools improve on-time graduation rates by more than 10 percentage points and college readiness rates by more than 25 percentage points.
The Philadelphia Teacher Residency is among the programs highlighted in WHYY’s story about what a “typical” teacher looks like in that city: a white woman with a bachelor’s degree, roughly a decade of teaching experience, and a median annual salary of $63,000. The residency is cited as a program that the district hopes will enhance diversity and retention rates in its teaching force.
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Polls and Research
The 50th annual PDK Poll of the Public’s Attitudes Toward the Public Schools finds that Americans trust and support teachers, but they don’t want their own children to join a profession they see as undervalued and low-paid. More than half of the respondents – 54 percent – said they would not want their child to become a public school teacher, a majority for the first time since the question was first asked in 1969.
Another poll, by the journal EducationNext, found that last spring’s teacher strikes “lent new urgency to teacher demands for salary raises and increased financial support for schools.” The poll, conducted in May, found that 47 percent of Americans say teachers should be paid more, a 13-percentage point increase over last year. The poll also asked about charter schools, unions, immigration, and racial disparities in disciplinary practices, among several other topics.
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Featured News
Student Teaching in Chicago Public Schools
Teacher residencies have demonstrated how extended clinical experiences better prepare teachers for the classroom, but only a small percentage of new teachers get that kind of in-depth preparation. For the vast majority, the quality and depth of their student teaching experience varies wildly, and we actually know very little about it. Into which schools are student teachers most often placed? Who are their mentors? How does student teaching differ by residencies, alternative certification and traditional teacher prep?
A new brief by the University of Chicago Consortium on School Research examined student teaching in Chicago Public Schools in an effort to answer these questions and to better understand what aspects of a student teacher’s experience were strong indicators of successful first-year teachers.
Among the findings:
- A student teacher’s opinions on their preparedness at the end of their student teaching experience did not correlate to their performance as teacher-of-record
- The type and quality of the mentorship and coaching provided by the student’s mentor teacher mattered more than what was on mentor’s resume. “What mattered most was mentor teachers' modeling effective teaching practices, and coaching with constructive feedback in a safe learning environment,” the report states
- Student teachers are unlikely to train in low-performing schools or in schools with large numbers of low-income students
- A mentor teacher’s assessment of a student teacher’s instructional practices was a good indicator of the student’s first-year teaching performance
The report’s authors recommend teacher preparation programs work with school districts to ensure that student teachers are placed into schools that more closely mirror the types of schools they are likely to be hired into after graduation–that is to say, low-performing and/or those with higher numbers of high-need students.
The report also highlights the differences in the training and development offered by residencies, traditional prep and alternative certification programs. Not surprisingly, the researchers found that those in traditional programs and residencies took far more methods courses than did those in alternative certification programs.
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 Bold Set of Teacher-Prep Standards Still Faces Challenges
Ed Week
Five years after The Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation adopted its new standards, focused on evidence and outcomes, the effort is still met with “challenges and changes.”
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Send your news, updates and links.
kfischer@nctresidencies.org
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