Alternative Routes to Teacher Preparation

April 29, 2008

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“Alternatively certified teachers perform as well or better than traditionally certified teachers,” said Davida Gatlin, a second and third grade teacher in the Dominican Republic at a Center for American Progress event yesterday. Gatlin is the author of a new report from CAP entitled, “Thinking Outside of the University: Innovation in Alternative Teacher Certification,” which argues in favor of allowing innovative alternative preparation programs to exist outside of universities. She argues that innovative programs should be operated by a diversity of providers, including non-profit organizations, community colleges, and school districts, and individual schools to test new approaches to teacher preparation. The event brought together a diverse group of education professionals to discuss the report and its implications.

Gatlin explained that approximately 50 percent of alternative teacher preparation programs are currently operated by colleges and universities, whose programs are not always adequately preparing high quality teachers for hard-to-staff schools and subjects such as math and science. In the report, Gatlin says this is because teacher preparation curriculums at universities tend to focus on educational methods at the expense of courses in subjects to be taught. Moreover, university based programs frequently require excessive coursework that is not related to teacher effectiveness.

Alternative certification programs, on the other hand, can experiment with unique approaches for training teachers, and have the potential to attract high quality candidates such as mid-career professionals. Programs such as Teach for America and the Boston Teacher Residency program have already seen success in training new teachers. Gatlin argues that to encourage the growth of these types of innovative programs , states will need to revise their licensure requirements and strengthen evaluation and accountability for their teacher preparation programs.

Jesse Solomon, the director of the Boston Teacher Residency Program, disagreed with Gatlin’s assessment of his program. “Our folks are not alternative in the way this paper defines it,” he said. “We’re just trying ideas and responding to issues.” The residency program, which will produce 84 teachers for Boston schools this year, is based on a medical residency model. The program awards students with a master’s degree, hires its own instructors, designs its curriculum, and tailors it to the work required in Boston. He added that, “we’re not worried so much about innovation as finding stuff that’s good for kids.”

Sharon Robinson, president and CEO of the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education, also pointed out that some universities and colleges are trying innovative approaches to prepare teachers. She agrees that better performance assessments should be developed for new teachers and praised the recommendations in the paper, but cautioned against competition between the “innovators” and “traditional proprietors,” and said that everyone needed to work together “to fix the system to provide a sustained quantity of educational workforce needs.”

Steven Farr, vice president for knowledge development and public engagement at Teach for America, also pointed to all the organizations’ larger common goal, saying that the most important issue in designing programs to prepare new teachers is addressing the achievement gap in the country. “We have a common problem we need to solve,” he said. “We have to know we are closing the achievement gap with our students.”

The panelists agreed that to achieve this goal, there needs to be a national effort to measure teacher performance and better incentives to keep effective teachers in the system.

For more on this event, please visit the events page.