The
surprising news about Russ Whitehurst’s departure from Brookings Institution’s
Brown Center on Education Policy, a center he had ably led since 2009, has us
scratching our heads as much as anyone else in the DC policy community.
As an
organization, NCTQ is very grateful to Whitehurst for his continuing work on
NCTQ’s Audit Panel, where he’s helped make sure the ratings processes for the Teacher
Prep Reviewmeet
the highest standards. But of course his justly earned claim to fame is his
having founded the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute for Education
Sciences. And it was as director there that he helped lay the intellectual
foundation for far stronger teacher preparation and classroom instruction than
we have today.
One of the
main obstacles to improving teacher effectiveness has long been the meager
research base on what teachers should
be trainedto be able to do. The
relative paucity of research in what works in teaching as compared to, for
example, medicine, has paved the way for the field’s abdication of training
altogether.
But while
there remains much we do not know about what constitutes good teaching, there
in fact is a core set of strategies, identified through high-quality research,
that every teacher should master. Russ had the IES assemble and pressure-test
this research, and then put out highly readable practice guides highlighting the teaching strategies that have the
greatest demonstrated impact. Thanks to him, teaching and teacher prep now have
some of the blocks around which the profession could be built.
Unfortunately, as we’ve found in our own past
research on training in classroom management and our upcoming report on the fundamentals of
instruction, these practice guides have gone largely ignored by teacher
educators. But by publicly rating programs on how well they train teachers to
use the strategies in the practice guides, we aim to draw the field’s attention
back to the strong research contained in the practice guides and firmly
ensconce Whitehurst’s legacy in the training of new teachers.
