State Scores Well on Improving Teacher Quality

California’s public schools have been ranked low relative to other states in so many areas in recent years--per-pupil spending, the quality of school libraries, the ratio of counselors and psychologists to students, reading and math performance--that more such revelations would hardly count as news.

Thus it is noteworthy when the state’s public school system does get high marks, as in a report out this week from the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation.

“The Quest for Better Teachers: Grading the States” says that California is doing a far better job than most other states in the critical area of improving the quality of its teaching force. Overall, the state’s efforts rate a grade of B; that was far better than the nation as a whole, which the foundation says deserved only a D+.

California’s high ranking, behind only Texas, Florida and Michigan, may surprise many. After all, more than 1 in 10 teachers (closer to 1 in 4 in Los Angeles) are not fully trained and are working with emergency permits issued by the state while they complete their course work.

But the foundation gave California high marks for holding schools accountable for students’ performance, for providing alternative pathways into teaching, and for its high number of charter schools. The state received low marks for not giving principals control over hiring.

In this and previous reports, the politically conservative foundation, which is based in Dayton, Ohio, is pushing the idea that the preparation of teachers ought to be largely deregulated.

Rather than requiring teacher candidates to study education--where they learn “how” to teach--the focus ought to be on making sure teachers are steeped in academic subjects, the “what” of education, the report says. Moreover, the foundation takes the position that teachers ought to be judged not based on what credentials they have earned but on the academic performance of their students.

As the report notes, these positions put the foundation at odds with the dominant view of, among others, the National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future. According to the commission, which issued two influential reports on these issues during the 1990s, high-quality teaching will result from more rigorous and tightly controlled preparation courses, not less.

That group, under the direction of Stanford University education professor Linda Darling-Hammond, advocates more training in how to teach, in addition to preparation in a subject. The commission also says that teachers should go through a process of internships and mentoring before gaining a professional credential.

But the new Fordham report says, “The regulatory strategy, in a word, is bankrupt.”

Chester E. Finn Jr., the foundation’s president, said in an interview that “it’s time for a great big experimental approach to this in America rather than assuming that one approach has got this thing nailed.”

Instead, Finn said, states should develop a comprehensive system of accountability that judges schools based on student performance and enables students to leave weak schools to seek stronger ones. States also should give principals control over who teaches at their school and base teacher salaries partly on student achievement.

In addition, the report says, teachers’ knowledge of subject matter must be emphasized. And finally, schools should be able to hire knowledgeable people from a variety of backgrounds, allowing them to bypass conventional teacher preparation programs.

The model, Finn said, is based loosely on the idea of charter schools, which are publicly financed schools that are largely free of state rules and which usually have local hiring authority. California now has nearly 250 such schools, representing about 3% of the total in the state.

California’s new accountability program, which will rank schools and award bonuses to teachers based on student test scores, earned it a grade of A on that score. The state also got an A for requiring teachers to have an undergraduate major in a subject, rather than in education.

Another A grade was awarded for pioneering internship programs in California that enable people to easily become teachers who had been working in other fields, such as engineering or sales.

But the state, like most others, was given a failing grade for not doing enough to give principals authority over who to hire.

The full text of the report can be found on the Internet at https://www.edexcellence.net.