The New York City Department of Education is thinking about getting into the teacher prep business [link to GothamSchools, Ed Gadfly and ?], joining other renegade efforts such as Relay, the Match School and Teach For America. GothamSchools claims “such a move would grant an unprecedented level of authority to local education officials while heightening competition with existing teacher prep programs.”
While we think that if traditional prep were providing the kind of training it should be, NYC wouldn’t even think about such a move. Nor would any of these other groups. What has us wondering if what traditional teacher prep makes of a decision by the nation’s second largest school district that is so overtly dismissive. Instead it seems to precipitate more wagon-circling than soul-searching.
A year ago I actually posed this precise question to a decidedly unfriendly audience of teacher educators at the annual AACTE conference. Instead of spending so much time denigrating Teach For America, I asked, why weren’t more people in the field asking why Teach For America had been able to gain such traction? The answers I got were not very satisfactory with some bordering on conspiracy theories.
We estimate that a couple of dozen states appear to allow their districts to do what New York City is proposing, but as much as districts want to tackle this problem, the venture appears to veer too far from a district’s core mission to be done on a broad scale California has allowed districts to certify teachers since 1984 and a grand total of 3 percent of teachers prepared in 2009-10 were certified by districts, mostly in areas of dire shortage such as secondary science and special education. In Maryland, TNTP has been provided the authority to train math teachers without the help of teacher prep. Since traditional teacher prep hasn’t been very successful recruiting teachers to fill either STEM or special ed, the impact on them has been nil.
Maybe we’re at a tipping point now in teacher prep reform and the impact of additional district certification would be felt in entirely new ways. Or maybe the colussus of traditional prep would — as it has did so well when it swallowed half of the pie of alternative certification — continue to operate largely unperturbed.
Julie Greenberg