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• NCTQ Advisory Board Member Jason Kamras Named 2005 National Teacher of the Year
• Darling-Hammond vs. TFA: The Battle Continues
• Home-Grown Teacher Training
• Tarheel Troubles, Take Two
• Rudy's Recruiting a New Crew
• Merit-Pay Melee in the Mile-High City
• Firing Goes High Tech in Chicago
• Highest-Performing Minority Students not Becoming Teachers

NCTQ advisory board member and TFA alum Jason Kamras has been named as the 2005 National Teacher of the Year in a ceremony held today in the Rose Garden at the White House. As the first Washington, DC teacher to achieve this honor, Kamras will take a year sabbatical from his classroom at the John Philip Sousa Middle School in the SE to put a face on the collective effort to reform teaching profession by reaching out to fellow teachers, students, business leaders, policy makers and elected officials around the country. The National Teacher of the Year competition is sponsored by the ING Group, the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO), and the Scholastic Corporation.

It would have been too much to expect that the recent gold-plated study of Teach For America by the research firm Mathematica would silence TFA's most vocal critic, Linda Darling-Hammond. The Stanford ed school professor's history of tangling with TFA has proven to be much more than a mere academic debate that could be settled by the facts at hand. TFA is a fundamental threat to the teaching profession. If amateurs are allowed in the classroom, a critical principle unravels: that teaching is a profession requiring years of training.

Having met with little rhetorical success- mostly because parents and schools just plain like the energy and smarts that TFA has to offer- Darling-Hammond continues to hammer away, this time with a study looking at the impact of TFA corps members in the classroom. While the research community may have long ago reached some unsettling conclusions about the bias of Darling-Hammond's research, the larger public is often persuaded hook, line, and sinker.

The study, presented at this month's AERA conference, asserts that TFA teachers are measurably worse than certified teachers- at least those teaching 4th and 5th grade in Houston. Notably, there's little mention of the definitive $2 million Mathematica study, other than to dismiss it for not having "explicitly compared TFA teachers to teachers with standard training and certification, controlling for other student, teacher, and school variables." This statement is just not true.

Where it is true is in Darling-Hammond's own study. She compares a tiny number of uncertified TFA teachers- ranging from 8 to 21 teachers in a period over six years, presumably teaching in the worst schools in Houston- with well over a thousand certified teachers across the district. Critical school variables were ignored. School-level results could have been reported; why weren't they? Further, the results of tests given to Spanish-speaking students, delivered by fewer than a handful of TFA teachers, are given the same weight as a test administered to thousands of Houston students, on which TFA teachers produced more significant success.

Unfortunately, this study will take on a life of its own and will be cited repeatedly as evidence of the harm inflicted by TFA corps members. This field is so politicized that many in it have no qualms over citing weak research - if it advances the cause.

For a fuller explanation of the methodological flaws in this study, we asked NCTQ Advisory Board member Dr. Michael Podgursky for his views. Follow the link below for more from Dr. Podgursky.

Across the country there are a handful of programs that somehow find the money to transition new teachers into the classroom the right way...that is, providing lots of hand-holding by an experienced teacher for a full year before letting a new teacher fly solo. Programs like the Chicago Academy for Urban School Leadership (AUSL) and Boston's "Teacher Residency" (BTR) program are amazing-- not for their innovation, but because the money has been found to make them happen.

State and local officials perennially grumble over forking over taxpayer money for the Cadillac level of teacher induction that some school settings simply require, so both of these programs got off the ground through the largesse of individuals and private foundations. NCTQ Advisory Board member Mike Koldyke is single-handedly responsible for the Chicago program. The Boston program was originally funded by an initial two-year $2.2 million grant from Strategic Grant Partners, a consortium of private family foundations.

The Boston and Chicago programs are alike in many regards, giving carefully selected new teachers a full year under the tutelage of great, experienced teachers. Both programs lead to towards a master's degree and full certification. One key difference, however, is the cost of putting one teacher resident through each program. The Boston program is training teachers for much less money than the Chicago program, offering only a $10,000 stipend, not Chicago's full salary of $30,000. Boston's smaller stipend may seem off-putting, but it works... many students hoping to teach enroll in graduate school full-time without any type of salary; here, graduate school is considered a "job" in itself.

And what's most promising about the Boston program is that it may be luring in some public funding. The City of Boston is buying into the program due to its relatively minor cost--and the high demand for it. Local officials are making plans to phase in taxpayer money over the course of the next several years, eventually expanding the program to include over 300 teaching residents per year.

The battle over testing requirements rages on in North Carolina. In a previous issue, we reported on proposed legislation which would exempt out-of-state teachers from the state's subject matter testing requirements (the state's cut scores are some of the highest in the country). The State House has since passed the bill--by a unanimous vote--and now it's making its way to the Senate.

But Governor Mike Easley (R) and State Board of Education chairman Howard Lee are persisting in their vocal opposition to the bill. Reportedly, the State Board is working on ways to confirm these teachers' qualifications by other means, but it's not at all clear what exactly those might be. Given that until a few years ago less than half of all states had any subject matter testing, this bill is a clear throwback to pre-NCLB thinking.

In fact, the legislature's proposed solution to North Carolina's alleged crisis is wholly off-target: shortages of math, science, and special ed teachers call for targeted incentives and expansion of alternate routes to licensure, not an across-the-board lowering of standards. North Carolina's legislators would really be earning their pay if they had the gumption to reform policies, rather than abandoning them. Why not do something to draw talented liberal arts grads and idealistic career-switchers into the profession?

Perhaps Lee has the nerve: he told one reporter, "We've got to be creative. You've got to do something to get people to give up other career paths and come into the classroom."

The ever-inventive Rudy Crew, superintendent of schools in Miami-Dade County, has come up with a way to attract great teachers to high-needs schools, and to get more bang for the buck once they get there. Grouping 39 schools into the "School Improvement Zone," Crew is offering the zone's teachers a 20 percent pay increase (an average of $10,000 a year)in return for increasing their contractual workday by 20 percent. Teachers' extra hours buy the district an extended school day and year (an extra hour every day, and ten more days added to the school year), and allow teachers to spend more time on professional development.

How is Crew footing the bill? Primarily by not filling some "open, non-essential, budgeted positions," a phrase that begs a few questions about their budgeting process--but let's not look this gift horse in the mouth.

Three months into the program, it appears that the carrot is effectively attracting more experienced teachers into these schools. So far, 177 teachers have elected to transfer into these schools, giving principals a rare treat--the opportunity to pick and choose who they want to hire. When asked how he felt about another principal who encouraged teacher Kennetha Jones to transfer into his school, Lakeview Elementary School Principal Jeffery Hernandez said, "I kiss the ground he walks on."

In the midst of contract negotiation acrimony, some Denver teachers are threatening to rain on the city's merit pay parade. In spite of these rumblings, Denver Classroom Teacher Association president Becky Wissink insists that the union's support for the ProComp plan (which we still think sounds more like a fertilizer than the nation's most sweeping reform in teacher pay)is not up for debate. Last year, 59 percent of the union voted to support ProComp, which will go into effect in 2005-2006 if voters approve a $25 million per year property tax hike this November. Some teachers may not go to bat for the proposal, however, unless the union and the district can come to a consensus on an across-the-board cost-of-living wage increase.

Still, Michelle Moses, a Denver school board member, is optimistic about ProComp's future: "Why would teachers do anything to put in jeopardy $25 million a year to pay them? It's like shooting yourself in the foot."

A new system in Chicago is allowing principals to fire non-tenured teachers with the click of a computer button. It's something they'll have to do a lot of: the districts expect to lay off some 1,100 non-tenured teachers before next fall. Principals simply choose from a menu of six reasons why they wish to dismiss a teacher, and finalize the dismissal by pressing the "not renew" button. One principal says of the new process, "This is an easier way for principals to get rid of that dead weight."

"Less than half a percent of Asian American and African American high-achievers choose education majors."

This grim quote is taken from a December 2004 report by the Educational Testing Service that examines SAT data to better understand the career choices of high-achieving minorities. The report looks at student achievement (SAT score) disaggregated by a number of different categories. However, the bottom-line finding is a confirmation of what economists like Caroline Hoxby and others (TQB February 29, 2004) have noted before: "Choices of college major seemed more related to academic background than to racial/ethnic groups." In other words, middle and low achieving minorities are far more likely to choose education as a major than the high academic achievers.