Commission: Redesign Teaching Profession

Alabama must enact reforms that give teachers greater opportunities to advance their careers while they remain in the classroom if the state is to continue recruiting and retaining highly effective teachers, a commission put together by Governor Bob Riley recommends.

The Governor’s Commission on Quality Teaching presented its second report - Innovations in Teaching: Creating Professional Pathways for Alabama Teachers - to Governor Riley today outlining seven recommended reforms. The Governor created the commission to develop reforms aimed at increasing student achievement through improved teacher effectiveness.

Two recommendations made by the commission in an earlier report to the Governor were enacted in 2007. That year the State Board of Education adopted the Alabama Quality Teaching Standards developed and recommended by the commission and the state created the Alabama Teacher Mentoring Program, which pairs a veteran teacher with each of the state’s beginning teachers during their first year in the profession.

Commission members, many of them current or former teachers, say the existing structure of the teaching profession provides few options for teachers to advance in their careers without moving out of the classroom and into school administration.

“We are losing too many great classroom teachers to administration because becoming a principal or curriculum specialist is the only way to ‘move up’ in our profession,” Suzanne Culbreth, a teacher at Spain Park High School in Hoover, wrote in the report.

Governor Riley said the recommendations are visionary and will result in a “redesign” of the teaching profession that will benefit both teachers and students.

“Alabama is breaking new ground with this approach,” said Governor Riley. “With the recommendations in this report, we will afford excellent teachers with professional pathways that advance their careers without making them leave the classroom. We elevate a profession that is already so important to the future of Alabama.”

Dr. Betsy Rogers, a former National Teacher of the Year, chairs the Governor’s Commission on Quality Teaching.

“Professional Pathways will be a unique Alabama recruiting tool for future teachers as they will be able to distinguish options throughout a teaching career,” Dr. Rogers wrote in the report.

Third-year teacher Taylor Ross of Brighton School in Jefferson County also praised the reforms. “I will no longer feel the need to leave the classroom for leadership opportunities or personal advancement, but can continue to daily impact students who need a strong, proven teacher.”


Recommendations by Governor’s Commission on Quality Teaching


1. Professional Pathways for Alabama Teachers - The Commission recommends that two systems be selected as “demonstration sites” to begin implementation of the Professional Pathways system. The Commission would raise $75,000 from private sources for a planning grant to work on development with the two systems beginning in the summer of 2009.

2. Improve the Quality of Teacher Preparation - This set of recommendations seeks to structure meaningful partnerships between Colleges of Education and P-12 schools and districts in order to improve both the academic and clinical preparation of prospective teachers. This includes a strong focus on Alabama-specific initiatives, such as the Alabama Reading Initiative and the Alabama Math, Science, and Technology Initiative (AMSTI). They also aim to increase the accountability of teacher preparation institutions for the quality of their graduates.

3. Consolidate and Expand Teacher Recruitment Efforts - These recommendations include a centralized and user-friendly teacher recruitment website, student-produced ads to highlight the opportunities provided by the teaching profession, and a pilot seminar course in teaching for high school students.

4. Improving and Expanding Alternative Certification - These recommendations seek to create new routes that encourage the best and the brightest to enter the teaching profession. They include (a) a partnership with Teach for America to bring talented young people from across the country to teach in high-needs areas in Alabama, (b) improving the quality of our current Alternative Baccalaureate Certification, and (c) creation of an adjunct certification to allow individuals with recognized expertise and experience in high needs disciplines to work part time in public schools.

5. Maintain and expand the Alabama Teacher Mentoring Program - The Commission recommends the continued funding of Alabama’s highly-successful mentoring program for first-year teachers and the addition of a low-cost program for second-year teachers that uses small groups to continue their training and enhance small learning communities in schools..

6. Adopt a new definition for professional development - The Commission recommends that the State Board of Education adopt the National Staff Development Council’s definition of professional development to clarify, enhance, and support the existing Professional Development Standards.

7. Continue the biennial administration of the Take 20 Teaching and Learning Conditions Survey - The Commission feels it is critical that we institutionalize the biennial administration of our teaching and learning conditions survey to all educators so that leaders can continually assess the state of their schools and plan for constant improvement. The Take 20 survey was recommended by the Commission in 2007 and first administered to all Alabama educators in 2008.

Support from National Organizations

Dr. Tom Carroll, Executive Director of the National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future: “By creating new roles and career pathways for Master Teachers and Learning Designers, to augment the work of professional teachers, Alabama will be well positioned to take advantage of the wealth of knowledge, skills, and experience it has developed in its teaching workforce.”

Stephanie Hirsch, Executive Director of the National Staff Development Council: “Professional Pathways for Alabama Teachers has the potential to transform the culture of both the profession to which teachers belong and the schools in which they work.”

Dr. Barnett Berry, President and CEO of the Center for Teaching Quality: “The innovative teaching reforms proposed in this report of the Governor’s Commission on Quality Teaching can help Alabama prepare a new generation of educators ready to meet the vastly different teaching demands of the next decade and beyond.”

Full report:
http://www.governorpress.alabama.gov/documents/InnovationsinTeachingRpt.pdf

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Study Compares Charter Schools, Traditional Schools

A new University of Indianapolis study suggests that students with achievement deficits experience greater academic growth in charter schools than similar students at traditional public schools.

The study and subsequent report, A Comparison of Student Academic Growth between Indiana Charter Schools and Traditional Public Schools, was prepared by the Center of Excellence in Leadership of Learning (CELL) at the University of Indianapolis, in collaboration with Research and Evaluation Resources.

Key findings:
* Charter school students differ from traditional school students in critical ways: They enter charter schools at an academic disadvantage relative to their traditional school counterparts, as evidenced by their entering scores on the Indiana Statewide Testing for Educational Progress (ISTEP), and they are more likely to be members of minority groups and low-income households.
* Charter schools have the same attendance and stability rates as traditional schools.
* Students who had been enrolled at least two years in their charter school showed significantly greater academic growth when compared to a controlled sample of students from traditional Indiana schools that were similar in demographic characteristics and baseline academic achievement. Charter school students showed 22% more growth in reading, 18% more growth in math and 25% more growth in language usage.
* The growth in reading and language usage for charter students exceeded national growth averages. Math growth was on a par with the national average.
* Cost per unit of academic growth was lower in charter schools.

The study was commissioned by Indiana Black Expo, the Indianapolis Urban League and the DeHaan Family Foundation. “We support efforts to identify successful educational practices that can be replicated by any school working to improve academic achievement,” said Joseph A. Slash, president and chief executive officer of the Urban League. “Charter schools represent one option.”

The CELL study is significant in that it is the first in Indiana to compare academic growth of students in charter schools with similar students attending traditional public schools—students matched for gender, ethnicity, socioeconomic status and initial level of academic performance.

The study used information from the Indiana Department of Education to compare students in 40 charter schools throughout the state with traditional public school students in those same communities, including Indianapolis, Fort Wayne, Evansville, Gary, Richmond, Lafayette, New Albany, Noblesville and Carmel. The data included attendance, enrollment stability, ISTEP scores, teacher salaries, student-teacher ratio and spending per pupil.

The researchers then examined scores from across the state on the Northwest Evaluation Association (NWEA) twice-annual Measures of Academic Progress, to gauge academic growth in reading, language usage and math from Fall 2006 through Spring 2008. All but one of Indiana’s charter schools, as well as 126 school districts in the state, use the NWEA assessment, making it well suited for such a comparison.

CELL researchers caution that while the differences in growth between charter and traditional students are statistically significant, the specific factors that contributed to the academic growth are not known. Also, no conclusions can be drawn about academic gains for students who do not fit the socioeconomic and educational profile of the students studied.

“These results are very interesting, but more long-term analyses are needed to see if the findings are stable and if the same patterns emerge when we measure the outcome in different ways,” said Mary Jo Rattermann, chief researcher.

The third area of study, cost effectiveness, sought to determine the cost to produce one unit of academic growth in a student on the NWEA assessment. Using that gauge, charter schools produced greater gains in achievement for every dollar spent than did comparable traditional public schools. However, only general fund expenses were compared, and other factors may exist that were not included in the study.

The researchers note that their work, while not the first to analyze the impact of charter schools, represents a different way of benchmarking academic success by not basing it on traditional achievement testing practices that are designed to determine whether a student meets a fixed minimum standard, such as ISTEP cut scores. Instead, the CELL study examined specific academic growth over a period of time.

While far from definitive, the study points to several directions for further research, including studies that evaluate specific aspects of charter school students’ experiences as well as those of students in traditional public schools that are most associated with gains in academic achievement.

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New Location For This Report

All posts can be found here:
http://www.queuenews.com/EduResearchRpt.html

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