Monday, December 3, 2007

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John McDonald
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California Reduces Underprepared Teachers by 25,000
But new report from the Center for the Future of Teaching and Learning says state lacks a coherent system to strengthen teaching, urges policymakers to focus on quality

(Sacramento) California has reduced the number of underprepared teachers by more than 25,000 over the past five years, according to a new report released today by the Center for the Future of Teaching and Learning. There were 42,000 underprepared teachers in California in 2000-01, and just over 15,000 in 2006-07, a reduction from 14% of the workforce to just 5%.

“These gains in the supply of qualified teachers represent a significant accomplishment for policymakers and those in the education community,” said Margaret Gaston, executive director of the Center for the Future of Teaching and Learning. “As demand eases, the time is right to focus on strengthening teaching quality.  We would like to see the conversation turn toward building teaching capacity.”

But the report also cautions that the gains in the supply of qualified teachers mask difficult problems.  Poor and minority students are still much more likely to have an underprepared teacher than their more advantaged white peers, and low achieving schools continue to face significant challenges in hiring qualified teachers. Additionally, the supply of teachers is threatened by declining production of new teachers and looming retirements of an aging teacher workforce.

 Further, California students are still not meeting the academic standards the state has set for them. While test scores have shown gains, more than half of the state’s students still are not considered “proficient” on the California Standards Tests in English and mathematics, and the achievement gap between white and Asian students and African-American and Latino students has not narrowed.

“This report makes clear the next important step in making public schools better is building a teacher development system that focuses on strengthening the quality of teaching in order to improve student outcomes. Fortunately, California already has many of the components of such a system in place,” says Gaston. 

The Status of the Teaching Profession 2007 examines how quality is measured across key points in a teacher’s career — teacher preparation, hiring, and evaluation — and concludes that California currently does not have a coherent teacher development system that builds knowledge and skill.

“California does not rigorously measure teaching quality or use and share what information is collected to improve teaching quality,” says Patrick Shields, director of the Center for Education Policy at SRI International and the principal researcher for the report.  “Assessments should yield information that can be better used to strengthen the quality of teaching to improve student outcomes. And this information should be shared to create a coherent system of teacher development where learning continues throughout a teaching career.”

In examining teacher development, the report finds that information about the knowledge, attitudes and performance of teaching candidates is not used to strengthen preparation; hiring is based on weak data; and teacher evaluations are rarely based on meaningful data or used to improve teaching practice. Making matters worse, information is not shared across the components of the teacher development continuum to strengthen preparation programs, inform hiring decisions and improve classroom practices.

“With ninety-five percent of classrooms now staffed by qualified teachers, the opportunity arises to turn our attention toward strengthening teaching,” said Gaston. “But to do that, we need a teacher development system that builds capacity. In what is sure to be a year of complex challenges, made more difficult by a lack of resources, we urge policymakers to stay focused on teaching quality.”

“We can start right now by making low-cost, high-yield changes in teacher development like simply passing on assessment information from teacher preparation programs to schools where the new teachers are hired. We also have to stop looking at assessments only as gate-keeping devices and start using them to strengthen practice.  This requires a sea change in how we collect and use assessment information.”

The Status of the Teaching Profession 2007 is produced and disseminated by the Center for the Future of Teaching and Learning. Research for the report is conducted by SRI International. The 2007 report provides the latest available data and analysis of California’s teaching workforce.  Key findings include:

Measurable Progress

• There are fewer underprepared teachers. 42,427 in 2000-01, 15,549 in 2006-07
• There are fewer novice teachers in the first or second year of teaching.  46,000 in 2000-01, 36,000 in 2006-07
• Schools of all types have lower percentages of underprepared teachers.  For example, in 2000-01, 23% of faculty in low achieving schools were underprepared.  In 2006-07, 8% were underprepared.

Persistent Problems

Low achieving schools serving poor and minority students are still more likely to have underprepared and inexperienced teachers.

• Schools in the lowest achievement quartile continue to have a higher percentage of underprepared teachers, on average, than schools in the highest achievement quartile. In 2006-07, on average, 8% of teachers in schools in the lowest achievement quartile were underprepared.  By comparison, only 2% of teachers in the highest achieving quartile were underprepared.
• In 2006-07, 54% of interns were teaching in schools in the lowest API achievement quartile.
• Ninety-four percent of principals in high achieving schools say they usually or always can hire fully prepared teachers.  By comparison, just 71 percent of principals in low achieving schools say the same thing.

The supply of fully prepared teachers faces continuing problems and future threats.   

• A quarter (26%) of new secondary teachers enter the workforce underprepared.
• Forty-four percent of novice special education teachers have not completed their preparation before they begin teaching.
• Thirty-two percent of the teaching workforce was 50 years old or older in 2006-07. About one-third of the workforce will be eligible for retirement within ten years.
• Enrollment in teacher preparation programs has declined from 44,820 in 2001-02 to 34,176 in 2004-05.

California needs a teacher development system

California rarely collects adequate data on teaching quality, and what data it does collect is not used to inform practice nor to strengthen preparation, hiring or professional development.

Teacher Preparation: Teacher candidate content knowledge is not used to inform preparation, candidate beliefs and attitudes are rarely measured, and assessments in coursework do not differentiate individual candidate skills. Student teaching is hampered by few opportunities for training and support of master teachers and supervisors.

Hiring: Decisions on hiring often rely on weak data. Teacher credential status is highly valued by principals, but characteristics associated with student achievement such as academic background are less valued. Hiring processes yield little information on a candidate’s pedagogical skills and content knowledge that can be used by principals and others during the selection process.  The size and quality of the candidate pool shapes how schools assess candidates’ teaching quality with high-wealth schools having larger candidate pools than high-need schools.  

Evaluation: Performance reviews do not measure teaching quality well and are rarely used to determine teacher professional development needs or set career goals. Less than half of school administrators value using student achievement data or student work to identify the ways in which teaching practice can be strengthened.  Data that are used to measure teaching quality fail to link measurement and support, or are infrequently used.

The Status of the Teaching Profession 2007 is part of the Center for the Future of Teaching and Learning’s Teaching and California’s Future Initiative. Cosponsors include California State University, Office of the Chancellor; the University of California, Office of the President; and WestEd.  The Stuart Foundation and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation provided funding for the report.

The full report and summary materials are available on the Center for the Future of Teaching and Learning website at www.cftl.org.  Print versions of the report are also available.  For additional information contact the Center at (831) 427-3628 or by email at info@cftl.org.

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