No teacher left behind?
Good news and bad about new routes to becoming a teacher
HGSE Professor Susan Moore Johnson

The teacher shortage is back, as a 21st century challenge. How can we attract strong people to study teaching, and train them to succeed in practice? Susan Moore Johnson, Pforzheimer Professor of Teaching and Learning at HGSE, tackles this key education issue as director of the Project on the Next Generation of Teachers. With colleagues Sarah Birkeland and Heather Peske, Johnson conducted a study that investigated a variety of alternative certification programs across four states (Connecticut, California, Louisiana, and Massachusetts). This article is a summary of "A Difficult Balance," the report they published in September, 2005.

The Problem

With the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB), President Bush laid out an ambitious set of goals for improving the quality of education for all students in the United States. One of the primary areas of focus was the improvement of teacher quality: NCLB mandated that all teachers become licensed in core subjects by the academic year 2005/2006.

At the start of the 2006/2007 academic year, however, there are not enough teachers to fill the classrooms, let alone highly qualified ones.

A number of factors have contributed to the teacher shortage, including a larger number of school-age children, higher teacher turn-over, and laws that reduce class size, such as California's Class Reduction Act of 1996.

Alternative Certification Programs: The Solution?

Alternative certification programs started in the mid-1980s to respond to the teacher shortage. These alternative programs were also designed to respond to the declining skills and lack of diversity among entering teachers, as well as prospective teachers' dissatisfaction with the quality of traditional programs. There was a growing perception that these traditional programs were becoming increasingly costly, lengthy, and impractical.

Traditional vs. Alternative Programs

1. Structure: Traditional programs involve a minimum of one year, and often two or three years, of coursework, much of it theory-based. Alternative programs, often referred to as "fast-track" programs, are much shorter, require less or no pre-service preparation, and emphasize practice rather than theory.
2. Approach: Traditional programs aim to produce a fully prepared teacher before he or she enters the classroom. In contrast, alternative programs move teachers into full-time jobs before they earn licensure. These programs approach teacher preparation as an ongoing process, one in which teachers continue to develop after their formal training is complete.
3. Candidates: Perhaps because of the differences in structure and approach, alternative programs tend to attract a more heterogeneous group of prospective teachers who possess a range of academic, professional, and life experiences.

Caveat: Johnson and her colleagues note that it is unrealistic to speak of alternative programs as following one set model. In reality, these programs vary widely according to setting, sponsor, requirements, resources, goals, and schedules.

The Study

Purpose

Launched in 2002, the "Difficult Balance" study was designed to answer a pressing question: How do alternative certification programs balance the two goals of increasing teacher supply and ensuring that new teachers are qualified to teach? As the report's title suggests, this balance is hard to establish and to maintain.

Method

Thirteen programs were selected in four states – Connecticut, California, Louisiana, and Massachusetts. The programs varied in their levels of centralization and size. The researchers visited each site and interviewed program directors, faculty, and teacher candidates. The teacher candidates were interviewed twice, once during the program and again 6-8 months into their first teaching job.

Major Findings

1. Statewide programs differed from locally grounded programs.

Statewide programs benefited from a large pool of candidates and employed consistent standards for selection, which ensured a high quality of participants. These programs also offered broad training for a variety of classroom settings. A weakness of these centralized programs was their inability to meet particular local needs and their lack of partnerships with local school districts.

The major strengths of locally grounded programs included their ability to respond to local needs and to prepare participants for specific jobs. However, because the training in these programs was tied so closely to the standards and curriculum of a particular district, participants' skills were not easily transferable to other educational contexts.

2. There was a tension between incentives and quality.

The incentives that attracted participants to alternative certification programs included the low cost of tuition and the relatively small time commitment. However, less money and less time typically limited programs' capacity to provide high quality training. Without money, programs could not hire the quantity and quality of faculty needed to provide participants with relevant training and meaningful mentoring experiences. Without time, participants' clinical experiences failed to prepare them adequately for the responsibilities of their first teaching jobs.

3. Participants identified five primary areas of concern.

• Participants commonly felt that they were not adequately prepared to teach the subject for which they were seeking licensure.
• Participants did not feel that they understood how to teach low-income students of color, who were commonly the students they encountered in their first teaching jobs.
• Clinical experiences typically involved teaching in a summer school setting. Participants found it difficult to find teaching experiences that were subject-appropriate and mentors who were willing and able to guide them.
• Statewide programs had the most trouble securing timely jobs for participants due to their lack of partnerships with local school districts. Participants were particularly disappointed about this, as they often viewed the prospect of a secured job as an incentive of their chosen program.
• Many participants felt they did not receive strong follow-up support on the job, from their fellow teachers and principal.

4. Programs did not consistently use the four levers of quality control.

The report recognizes four levers of quality control available to the programs: recruitment and selection of strong candidates; use of the state's standards to make decisions about program requirements; degree of innovation in program design and creative use of limited resources; and quality of formative and summative assessments to ensure candidate preparedness.

The programs studied used these four levers to varying degrees and with varying levels of success. Most programs relied on the recruitment and selection of strong candidates. Every program had some form of assessment, but it was rarely used as a means of quality control. The faculty used assessments to support participants, rather than judge their competence. As long as they showed up and did the work, they passed.

5. Success was not dependent on the program alone.

Because of the abbreviated nature of alternative programs, the skills and experiences that participants brought into the program and the support they received in their schools after the program became crucial to their perceived success as teachers. A good combination of personal skills and experiences included strong subject matter preparation, use of subject in previous job, and prior experience working with youth and/or in schools. A supportive school was well-equipped, orderly, and focused on learning; offered a practical introduction to its curriculum and daily routines, ongoing access to expert teachers' classrooms and advice, and regular feedback about teaching; and was able to hire early and offer participants manageable class loads with teaching assignments in the subject for which they were licensed.

Recommendations

"A Difficult Balance" makes recommendations targeted to policymakers, program directors, and prospective participants of alternative certification programs. These recommendations are reprinted below:

Policymakers

• Consider the tradeoffs in using centralized or decentralized approaches.
• Align purpose and design.
• Use partnerships to increase the capacity of alternative certification programs.
• Ensure that states and districts are involved in assessment.

Program Directors

• Select candidates carefully.
• Offer licenses only in subjects for which there are faculty experts.
• Prepare teachers to work with students of different races and backgrounds.
• Devise the best possible clinical experience.
• Build productive partnerships to increase program capacity.
• Provide job placement assistance for teachers applying to hard-to-staff schools.
• Ensure on-the-job support.
• Consider the potential of new pedagogies such as distance learning.
• Review the role of assessment in the program.

Participants

• Consider carefully whether the program is right for you.
• Choose a program that fits your career plans and training needs.
• Prepare for continuous learning in a teaching career.

Conclusion: A New Model

Johnson and her colleagues conclude their report by proposing a new model of alternative certification:

1. Creativity: Programs should think creatively about how to align their design and purpose instead of trying to recreate an abbreviated version of a traditional program.
2. Integration: Teacher training should be viewed as a continuous process rather than a one-shot deal. Although this is often a purported goal of alternative certification programs, Johnson and her colleagues found that most programs lacked the capacity to provide follow-up support once participants had begun their first teaching job. Training and teaching should be integrated in order to provide candidates with meaningful clinical and professional experiences.
3. Flexibility: Both statewide and locally grounded programs have their strengths. In order to take advantage of both sets of strengths, programs should adopt a flexible orientation that incorporates both generic and particularized training.
4. Strong partnerships: Partnerships with universities, non-profit and for-profit companies, and local schools are crucial for building fiscal and administrative capacity and providing candidates with quality instruction, meaningful mentoring relationships, and appropriate clinical experiences.

The complete text of "A Difficult Balance: Incentives and Quality Control in Alternative Certification Programs" is available on the HGSE Project on the Next Generation of Teachers web site.

By Katie Davis, doctoral student in Human Development and Education at HGSE.

For further reading on the broader topic of new teachers, Susan Moore Johnson recommends the following:

Johnson, S.M., Birkeland, S., Donaldson, M., Kardos, S., Kauffman, D., Liu, E. & Peske, H. (2004). Finders and keepers: Helping new teachers survive and thrive in our schools. San Francisco: Jossey Bass.

Levin, J. & Quinn, M. (2003). Missed opportunities: How we keep high quality teachers out of urban classrooms. Washington, DC: The New Teacher Project.

Luekens, M. T., Lyter, D. M., Fox, E. E., & Chandler, K. (2004). Teacher attrition and mobility: Results from the Teacher Follow-up Survey, 2000-01. Washington, D.C.: National Center for Education Statistics.