Hash it out: Contradictory findings on teacher prep and persistence

Districts
often ask NCTQ to identify the preparation programs that produce teachers who
will stay in the classroom through thick and thin. So we eagerly dove into two
recent articles, one by Richard
Ingersoll and
colleagues, the other
by Matthew
Ronfeldt and colleagues,thatexamine which aspects of teacher
preparation predict persistence – and we emerged a little perplexed.

Despite
sharing the same data sources (the US Department of Education’s School and
Staffing Survey and its companion Teacher Follow-Up Survey), the researchers
reach opposite conclusions. Ingersoll
et al. find “a large and cumulative relationship between pedagogy [i.e.,
methods courses, student teaching, etc.] and attrition.” First-year teachers
with the least training were three times more likely to leave teaching than
those with the most.

By contrast,
Ronfeldt et al. find that the whole
can be less than the sum of its parts. True enough, teacher candidates who take
more methods courses or who have more
weeks of student teaching are more likely to stay. But teachers who get full
doses of both student teaching and methods courses are actually
slightly more likely to leave teaching than those who just get one or the
other. Puzzling?  For sure.

The good news is that
both articles conclude that teachers who had a substantial stint of student
teaching are less likely to leave.
The bad news is that this finding doesn’t help us all that much in identifying
programs that prevent attrition, as most traditional programs now require such
a stint (i.e., a full semester).