Linda Darling-Hammond

CONSTRUCTING 21st-CENTURY TEACHER EDUCATION

Much of what teachers need to know to be successful is invisible to lay observers, leading to the view that teaching requires little formal study and to frequent disdain for teacher education programs. The weakness of traditional program models that are collections of largely unrelated courses reinforce this low regard. This article argues that we have learned a great deal about how to create stronger, more effective teacher education programs. Three critical components of such programs include tight coherence and integration among courses and between course work and clinical work in schools, extensive and intensely supervised clinical work integrated with course work using pedagogies that link theory and practice, and closer, proactive relationships with schools that serve diverse learners effectively and develop and model good teaching. The article also urges that schools of education should resist pressures to water down preparation, which ultimately undermine the preparation of entering teachers, the reputation of schools of education, and the strength of the profession.

How Teacher Education Matters

Despite longstanding criticisms of teacher education, the weight of substantial evidence indicates that teachers who have had more preparation for teaching are more confident and successful with students than those who have had little or none. Recent evidence also indicates that reforms of teacher education creating more tightly integrated programs with extended clinical preparation interwoven with coursework on learning and teaching produce teachers who are both more effective and more likely to enter and stay in teaching. An important contribution of teacher education is its development of teachers’abilities to examine teaching from the perspective of learners who bring diverse experiences and frames of reference to the classroom.

Defining “Highly Qualified Teachers”: What Does “Scientifically-Based Research” Actually Tell Us?

The Secretary’s report accurately claims that “researchers have found that some teachers are much more effective than others” (2002, p. 7). Studies using valueadded student achievement data have found that student achievement gains are much more influenced by a student’s assigned teacher than other factors like class size and class composition (Sanders & Horn, 1994; Sanders & Rivers, 1996; Wright, Horn, & Sanders, 1997). A recent analysis by Rivkin, Hanushek, and Kain (2001) attributes at least 7% of the total variance in test-score gains to differences in teachers. The Secretary’s report asserts, however, that “there is little evidence that education school course work leads to improved student achievement” (2002, p. 19), stating that the evidence about “knowledge of pedagogy, degrees in education or amount of time spent practice teaching”—which are the “requirements that make up the bulk of current teacher certification regimes”—is surrounded by a “great deal of contention” (p. 8). To support the assertion that “virtually all” of the studies linking certification and improved student outcomes are “not scientifically rigorous,” the Secretary’s report cites a report by Kate Walsh (2001), written for the Baltimore-based Abell Foundation,2 which asserts that there is “no credible research that supports the use of teacher certification as a regulatory barrier to teaching” (p. 5). Unfortunately, Walsh’s report excludes much of the evidence on the topic, misrepresents many research findings, makes inaccurate claims about studies that have examined the consequences In July 2002, the U.S. Secretary of Education issued the Secretary’s Annual Report on Teacher Quality (U.S. Department of Education) as required by the 1998 reauthorization of Title II of the Higher Education Act. In this report titled Meeting the Highly Qualified Teachers Challenge the Secretary essentially argues for the dismantling of teacher education systems and the redefinition of teacher qualifications to include little preparation for teaching. Stating that current teacher certification systems are “broken,” and that they impose “burdensome requirements” for education coursework that make up “the bulk of current teacher certification regimes” (p. 8), the report argues that certification should be redefined to emphasize higher standards for verbal ability and content knowledge and to de-emphasize requirements for education coursework—making student teaching and attendance at schools of education optional and eliminating “other bureaucratic hurdles” (p. 19). These conclusions rest on the following arguments, each of which is addressed in turn in this article: • Teachers matter for student achievement, but teacher education and certification are not related to teacher effectiveness. • Verbal ability and subject matter knowledge are the most important components of teacher effectiveness. • Teachers who have completed teacher education programs are academically weak and are underprepared for their jobs. • Alternative certification programs (ACPs) have academically stronger recruits who are highly effective and have high rates of teacher retention. The report suggests that its recommendations are based on “solid research.” However, none of these arguments has strong empirical support, and the report does not cite the scientific literature that addresses them: Only one reference among the report’s 44 footnotes is to a study that was eventually published in a peer-reviewed journal, and the study’s findings are misrepresented in the report. Most references are to newspaper articles or to documents published by advocacy organizations, some of these known for their vigorous opposition to teacher education.1 Although an accurate review of rigorous research on teacher qualifications and their relationship to student achievement could provide useful guidance to state policymakers, such a review is not to be found in this report. Instead, the Secretary’s report fails to meet the Department of Education’s own standards for the use of scientifically based research to formulate policy. The report cites almost no research that would meet scientific standards, misrepresents findings from a large number of sources, and includes many unsupported statements about teacher education and teacher certification. Whatever the contributions of this report to the debates on teacher quality, an accurate rendering of the research base on these important topics is not one of them. In this article we discuss the research base that treats the arguments made in support of the report’s recommendations and suggest that different conclusions would derive from a well-grounded rendering of the evidence. Research News and Comment

Variation in Teacher Preparation: How Well Do Different Pathways Prepare Teachers to Teach?

Does teacher education influence what teachers feel prepared to do when they enter the classroom? Are there differences in teachers’experiences of classroom teaching when they enter through different programs and pathways? This study examines data from a 1998 survey of nearly 3000 beginning teachers in New York City regarding their views of their preparation for teaching, their beliefs and practice, and their plans to remain in teaching. The findings indicate that teachers who were prepared in teacher education programs felt significantly better prepared across most dimensions of teaching than those who entered teaching through alternative programs or without preparation. Teachers’views of their preparation varied across individual programs, with some programs graduating teachers who felt markedly better prepared. Finally, the extent to which teachers felt well prepared when they entered teaching was significantly correlated with their sense of teaching efficacy, their sense of responsibility for student learning, and their plans to remain in teaching.

Teacher Education and the American Future

For teacher education, this is perhaps the best of times and the worst of times. It may be the best of times because so much hard work has been done by many teacher educators over the past two decades to develop more successful program models and because voters have just elected a president of the United States who has a strong commitment to the improvement of teaching. It may be the worst of times because there are so many forces in the environment that conspire to undermine these efforts. In this article, the author discusses the U.S. context for teacher education, the power of teacher preparation for transforming teaching and learning, and the current challenges for this enterprise in the United States.

Authentic assessment of teaching in context

Abstract The demands of teaching more challenging content to more diverse learners suggest a need for teacher education that enables teachers to become more sophisticated in their understanding of the effects of context and learner variability on teaching and learning. Instead of implementing set routines, teachers need to become ever more skillful in their ability to evaluate teaching situations and develop teaching responses that can be effective under different circumstances. This article examines how a growing number of teacher education programs are using authentic assessments of teaching – cases, exhibitions, portfolios, and problem-based inquiries (or action research) – as tools to support teacher learning for these new challenges of practice. Using specific teacher education programs as examples, the article examines how and why these strategies appear to provide support for teacher learning and avenues for more valid assessment of teaching. The authors also discuss circumstances in which these strategies may be less effective and suggest features of the assessments and programmatic contexts that are associated with more and less successful use.

Teacher Evaluation in the Organizational Context: A Review of the Literature:

This article presents a conceptual framework for examining the design and implementation of teacher evaluation processes in school organizations. Research on teaching, organizational behavior, and policy implementation suggests that different educational and organizational theories underlie various teacher evaluation models. The conceptions of teaching work and of change processes reflected in teacher evaluation methods must be made explicit if educational goals, organizational needs, and evaluation purposes are to be consonant and well served.

The Right to Learn and the Advancement of Teaching: Research, Policy, and Practice for Democratic Education

Of all the civil rights for which the world has struggled and fought for 5,000 years, the right to learn is undoubt. edly the most fundamental.... The freedom to learn .. . has been bought by bitter sacrifice. And whatever we may think of the curtailment of other civil rights, we should fight to the last ditch to keep open the right to learn, the right to have examined in our schools not only what we believe, but what we do not believe; not only what our leaders say, but what the leaders of other groups and nations, and the leaders of other centuries have said. We must insist upon this to give our children the fairness of a start which will equip them with such an array of facts and such an attitude toward truth that they can have a real chance to judge what the world is and what its greater minds have thought it might be. (pp. 230-231)

Race, inequality and educational accountability: the irony of ‘No Child Left Behind’

The No Child Left Behind Act, the major education initiative of the Bush Administration, was intended to raise educational achievement and close the racial/ethnic achievement gap. Its strategies include focusing schools’ attention on raising test scores, mandating better qualified teachers and providing educational choice. Unfortunately, the complex requirements of the law have failed to achieve these goals, and have provoked a number of unintended negative consequences which frequently harm the students the law is most intended to help. Among these consequences are a narrowed curriculum, focused on the low‐level skills generally reflected on high stakes tests; inappropriate assessment of English language learners and students with special needs; and strong incentives to exclude low‐scoring students from school, so as to achieve test score targets. In addition, the law fails to address the pressing problems of unequal educational resources across schools serving wealthy and poor children and the shortage of well‐prepared teachers in high‐need schools. A policy that would live up to the law’s name would need to address these issues and reshape the law’s requirements to enable the use of assessments and school improvement strategies that support higher‐quality teaching and learning.

ASSESSING TEACHER EDUCATION THE USEFULNESS OF MULTIPLE MEASURES FOR ASSESSING PROGRAM OUTCOMES

Productive strategies for evaluating outcomes are becoming increasingly important for the improvement, and even the survival, of teacher education. This article describes a set of research and assessment strategies used to evaluate program outcomes in the Stanford Teacher Education Program during a period of program redesign over the past 5 years. These include perceptual data on what candidates feel they have learned in the program (through surveys and interviews) as well as independent measures of what they have learned (data from pretests and posttests, performance assessments, work samples, employers’ surveys, and observations of practice). The article discusses the possibilities and limits of different tools for evaluating teachers and teacher education and describes future plans for assessing beginning teachers’ performance in teacher education, their practices in the initial years of teaching, and their pupils’ learning.