Teacher preparation has emerged as an acutely politicized and publicized issue in U.S. education policy and practice, and there have been fierce debates about the methods and reasoning behind it. Because of the importance of teachers and teacher education, policy should be driven by the best evidence based on high-quality research.
Promoting a legal strategy to achieve one set of ends can open the door for very different uses; in this case, that of teacher job protections and education rights litigation. In their eagerness to take on teacher job protections, the plaintiffs in Vergara v. State of California and follow-up litigation in New York may be inviting litigation with very different goals for school policy and reform.
Teach For America (TFA) receives hundreds of millions of public and private dollars and has garnered acclaim for sending college graduates, who do not typically have an education background, to teach in low-income rural and urban schools for a two-year commitment. The number of TFA corps members has grown by about 2,000% since its inception in 1990. The impact of these transitory teachers is hotly debated. Admirers see the program as a way to grow the supply of “outstanding” graduates, albeit temporarily, as teachers.
Various education innovations are often proposed as solutions to the problems of education in the United States. Moving an innovation from a few schools to a great many, so it can have a regional or national impact, is very challenging, however.
This brief discusses how three recent popular educational reform policies move teaching towards or away from professionalization. These reforms are (1) policies that evaluate teachers based on students’ annual standardized test score gains, and specifically, those based on value-added assessment; (2) fast-track teacher preparation and licensure; and (3) scripted, narrowed curricula. These particular policy reforms are considered because of their contemporary prominence and the fact that they directly influence the way teaching is perceived.
The annual MetLife Survey of the American Teacher finds teachers' job satisfaction plummeting from 59% to 44%. Perhaps this is a result of repeated attacks on themselves and their profession?
Ensuring that all students in America’s public schools are taught by good teachers is an educational and moral imperative. The teacher is the most important school-based influence on student achievement, and poor children and those of color are less likely to be taught by well-qualified, experienced, and effective teachers than other students.
Garantizar que a todos los estudiantes en las escuelas públicas de los Estados Unidos de Norte América les enseñen buenos docentes es un imperativo educativo y moral. El docente es la influencia escolar más importante en el logro de los estudiantes, y los niños en situación de pobreza y los de color cuentan con menos posibilidades de aprender con docentes bien calificados, con experiencia y efectivos que otros estudiantes.