Featured News

Memphis Teacher Residency earns top scores from state

Few states are as dedicated to improving teacher preparation as Tennessee, which annually evaluates the graduates of about 40 preparation programs. Every year, the state examines such things as the placement and retention of graduates in public schools and how well they’re performing in the classroom. This year’s report found that the Memphis Teacher Residency is one Tennessee’s top-performing teacher preparation programs.

The report has also become a key piece of evidence on the effectiveness of the residency model. The newest Educator Preparation Report Card, released Friday, showed that several non-traditional teacher preparation programs outperformed many of the state's major university teaching programs. Memphis Teacher Residency, an NCTR partner since 2009-10, improved its scores for the third consecutive year, and finished 2018 as one of the state’s highest-rated programs.

MTR, which partners with Union University, earned the highest rating possible–“Level 4”–one of fewer than 10 programs to achieve that distinction. The residency earned nearly 95 percent of the evaluation’s possible points, and nearly aced the "Provider Impact" category. Memphis has raised its score from 85 percent in 2015-16 to 95 percent this year. Some highlights:

• 95 percent of MTR’s three-year cohort earned an “overall teacher effectiveness” score of at least 3 (“at expectations”) on a 5-point scale, with 70 percent at either a 4 or 5.
• 69 percent of the MTR cohort posted student growth scores of at least a 3 on the state’s Tennessee Value-Added Assessment System; 35 percent scored a 4 or higher.
• 89 percent of the cohort was still working in a Tennessee public school “for three years running”

MTR teachers outperformed participants from other teacher providers whose grads work in Memphis schools, often by significant margins. In the category of Principal Observation, MTR had the highest ranking of all programs statewide, and it had the state’s fifth-highest student achievement scores.

“Our most recent year's effectiveness is a team effort of many great partners, staff, teachers and, most of all, the students who did the hard work of learning,” said David Montague, MTR’s executive director. "We're grateful to NCTR for a decade of support and friendship."

MTR also demonstrated it is helping address the state’s diversity gap among teachers. Only 15 percent of Tennessee teachers are people of color, yet 27 percent of MTR’s cohort identified as black, Hispanic, Asian or multi-racial.  

As districts and states struggle to recruit and retain effective teachers, Tennessee’s evaluation of the Memphis Teacher Residency demonstrates that the residency model is an effective strategy for preparing high quality, effective teachers for the schools and districts that need them most.