Credit: Alison Yin for EdSource Today

A report out this week urges California school districts to take a more assertive role in producing new teachers. A new one-half-billion-dollar appropriation to districts to improve instructor effectiveness presents the opening to practise this, although more land encouragement and incentives would assist, the study said.

"Districts must have increasing responsibility for recruiting and developing their own time to come teachers, rather than leave it up to teacher preparation programs to provide the teachers they need," concluded "Rethinking Instructor Preparation," by the Washington-based education consulting and research nonprofit Bellwether Teaching Partners.

Bellwether isn't the showtime to criticize the state'due south "fragmented" approach to instructor preparation. With few exceptions, time to come teachers get their subject area knowledge as college undergraduates and their initial instructor credential in a i-year graduate school program crammed with theory and, in many cases, a minimum of classroom do. Districts run grooming and induction programs like Get-go Teacher Support and Assessment, or BTSA, for inexperienced teachers subsequently they're on the job.

"Many districts encounter teacher grooming as someone else'south responsibility, and fail to recognize the crucial role they can play in cultivating teacher supply," the Bellwether Instruction Partners report said.

The land doesn't collect follow-upwards information on new teacher performance to measure how well graduate schools prepare teachers; in 2011, Gov. Jerry Chocolate-brown vetoed the creation of a teacher database that would take compiled this data. "Neither candidates applying to teacher preparation programs, nor schoolhouse leaders considering hiring their graduates, have reliable information near the quality of dissimilar grooming programs or the functioning of their graduates in the classroom," the report said.

Bellwether acknowledged recent efforts past the California Committee on Teacher Credentialing, which oversees instructor preparation programs, to streamline the standards for preparation programs and to focus on measuring how well programs are graduating teachers set for the classroom. The commission is requiring that all prospective teachers accept a functioning exam measuring classroom mastery. It is creating a "information dashboard" of program outcomes, including completion and employment rates. And it has loosened regulations on "blended programs" that give undergraduates a head kickoff on teacher training. While the commission "is moving in the right management, nevertheless, it may not arrive enough," the report said.

And these steps will non address predictions of a teacher shortage (run into EdSource article), citing evidence of unfilled teaching jobs in some districts, the sharp turn down in enrollment in and completion of credentialing programs over the by eight years, and state projections of increased hiring. The country has no strategy to deal with a shortage, the report noted.

"Many districts see teacher preparation as someone else'southward responsibility, and neglect to recognize the crucial part they can play in cultivating teacher supply," the report said.

Bellwether cites examples where commune initiatives and partnerships can serve as models:

  • Long Beach Unified, Long Beach City College and CSU Long Embankment have created a pipeline that produces 70 per centum of the district's new teachers, who graduate understanding the district's expectations and arroyo. The colleges and the district piece of work together to pattern teacher prep coursework with Long Beach Unified teachers and administrators teaching courses at the higher of pedagogy. The teacher attrition rate at Long Embankment Unified, the country'due south third-largest district, is half the national average, according to the report.
  • With federal funding and a grant from the S.D. Bechtel, Jr. Foundation, Fresno Unified, the state's fourth-largest commune, has established 2 twelvemonth-long teacher residency programs focusing on producing hundreds of new science and math teachers in the side by side 5 years. In a partnership with CSU Fresno, teacher candidates will work as full-fourth dimension apprentices alongside mentor teachers in Fresno Unified as they earn their educational activity credential and chief's degree. (See contempo EdSource article on Aspire Public Schools' residency program.)
  • Fresno and Long Beach are amongst districts that identify potential teachers among teachers' aides and other paraprofessionals. Long Beach's Career Ladder Program uses federal dollars allocated for low-income students and teacher development to underwrite the costs of teacher credentials and available's degrees, in commutation for a delivery to teach in the district. A number of districts offer education academies among their career education pathways for high schoolhouse students. Bellwether suggests that the state make this choice a higher priority in allocating the $500 million in the Career Pathways Trust establishing career pedagogy programs linking schools, businesses and community colleges.

Bellwether recommends that districts strengthen partnerships with credentialing programs through data-sharing agreements, supplying university programs with information on how their graduates did as teachers. The state credentialing commission, in turn, could require data sharing and include more feedback from K-12 districts in re-accrediting credentialing programs. Districts also should be more selective in assigning the best teachers to work with student teachers – a selection procedure that oft is "haphazard," Bellwether said.

Spending money differently

Districts have the power, under local command, and at present the money to take a more than innovative, active arroyo to recruiting and training new teachers, even though there's no state impetus prompting them to do so, the report said. The Local Control Funding Formula, the new system for funding schools that reasserts local command over spending decisions, does not make teacher quality a priority that districts must accost in their yearly spending and goal-setting certificate, the Local Control and Accountability Plan.

Bellwether recommends that the state and county offices of education "leverage the LCAP process to encourage districts to develop comprehensive talent strategies," including partnerships with preparation programs, hiring, training, evaluating and retaining teachers. The Country Board of Education and perhaps the Legislature would take to amend regulations or the funding formula police to add this caste of oversight – which is unlikely as long as Gov. Jerry Brown, who opposes tinkering with the law, is in office.

Bellwether also encourages districts to use their share of funding from the one-fourth dimension $500 million teacher effectiveness allocation that the Legislature included in the 2015-16 budget to bolster recruitment and teacher evolution in new ways – options that the state budget pecker permits just doesn't actively encourage.

The Bellwether report was funded past the California branch of Teach For America, which recruits loftier-achieving college graduates to teach primarily in low-income urban classrooms for a minimum of two years after only a summer of instructor training. Teach For America teachers are hired with an intern credential, reflecting their learn-on-the-job status. Some districts seek out Teach For America interns, who must earn their standard, preliminary teaching credential inside ii years, while other districts view intern teachers as an option of last resort.

The report took TFA's side in the contentious debate, citing that studies that showed that intern and other teachers trained through alternative credentialing programs were but as constructive as other first-year teachers. It also warned against equating teachers hired through emergency permits and waivers with intern teachers. "Policies that equate these emergency credentials with the intern credential are unsupported by evidence – and potentially harmful," the study said.

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