As a growing number of people bypass traditional preparation and begin teaching careers with only a summer’s worth of training, researchers are trying to assess whether they’re making the grade in their classrooms.
Supporters of these fast-track, “alternative-certification” routes into the teaching profession insist they are needed to combat teacher shortages. Skeptics say many low-quality alternative programs put woefully underprepared novices into the classroom.
“Can you imagine putting your child in front of a teacher who has not been evaluated before they begin to teach?” asks Barnett Berry, president of the Southeast Center for Teaching Quality, in Chapel Hill, N. C. “We’re willing to call any adult who we put in a classroom a teacher.”
So far, research is unable to resolve whether alternative programs produce competent teachers or warm bodies. Meanwhile, the number of teachers entering the profession through alternate routes keeps climbing. Nationally, the number doubled from 15,000 in 2000 to 30,000 in 2003. Chicago Public Schools anticipates hiring about a third of its 1,500 new teachers in the next year from alternative programs, about twice as many as last year.
Chicago’s 12 alternative-certification programs, run by non-profits and universities, are intended largely to fill teaching shortages in areas such as math, science and special education. By contrast, conventional programs in Illinois are churning out an excess of English and social studies teachers, says Toni Hill of the Department of Human Resources at Chicago Public Schools. “We get thousands of resumes from teachers. They’re just not the teachers we need.”
Alternative certification has helped ease teacher shortages around the country, especially in New Jersey, Texas and California, where fast-track programs now account for up to a half of newly hired teachers, according to Emily Feistritzer, CEO of the National Center for Alternative Certification in Washington, D.C. In Illinois, the number of teaching licenses issued to alternate-route teachers rose from 24 to 491 between the 1998-99 and 2002-03 school years, for a total of 967 such licenses granted in that time period.
Most alternate route programs try to attract well-educated professionals, such as engineers or lawyers, who want to leave their careers and teach but have no education credits. Rather than make them sit in a classroom with undergrad education majors for a year or two, fast-track alternatives typically offer them a crash course in teaching over the summer and immediate job-placement under the mentoring of an experienced colleague. During their first year, the new teachers take additional university education courses.
“These people are not put in classrooms with no support,” insists Feistritzer. “It’s not like you sign a piece of paper and show up to school on the first day and someone says ‘OK, go teach.’ “
But some critics say that alternate-route teachers with only a summer under their belt are in for a rude awakening when school bells ring in the fall. Some research has found that they are more likely to flee the profession than teachers who had the traditional semester’s worth of student teaching experience. In New Jersey, teachers who enter via alternate route programs leave teaching at twice the average rate after a year, according to the New Jersey Education Association.
Other research, however, suggests that alternate and traditionally prepared teachers drop out of teaching at comparable rates. Given that possibility, the unconventional route may be a better use of taxpayer money than education programs at publicly funded universities, argues Michael Podgursky, chairman of the economics department at the University of Missouri. Alternative-route programs train people who are already on the job, he says, while university programs train people who may never teach.
In his state, he found that only 60 percent of education majors at public universities began a teaching career in Missouri within five years of graduation. Education majors from public universities in New York entered teaching at an even lower rate, he says. “It’s very cost-inefficient.”
But the bottom line in the debate on teachers with fast-track alternative preparation is: Do they help or hurt children? Do their students learn as much? The unsatisfying answer: Nobody knows for sure. For instance, some research compares how students of the differently trained teachers perform on standardized tests without considering that children living in poverty tend to score lower. Alternate-route teachers are often assigned to teach the neediest kids.
A highly regarded scientific study released in June found that students of teachers from one alternative-route program, Teach for America, progressed as much in reading and slightly more in math than students of other teachers at the same schools. The study, by Mathematica Policy Research, collected standardized test results for 2,000 elementary school students in six high-poverty areas, including Chicago. The bad news was that none of the students in Mathematica’s study progressed very much. “They went from abysmal to a little less abysmal,” observes Daniel Humphrey, associate director of SRI International’s Center for Education Policy, who is conducting a national study on alternative-certification programs. “Given a really bad situation in these urban districts, Teach for America doesn’t make it any worse, and may make it a little bit better,” he says.
Of course, it’s impossible to generalize about alternate-route programs based on one study. And even the harshest critics of the programs generally agree that some are top-notch and at times exceed the training given in traditional programs.
The Academy for Urban School Leadership, a nonprofit founded by venture capitalist Martin Koldyke, runs Chicago’s state-of-the-art alternate route program. Instead of a summer crash course, prospective teachers spend 10 months as interns teaching alongside an expert teacher while earning a stipend of $30,000. They also take reduced-tuition, graduate-level courses and emerge from the yearlong program with a master’s degree in teaching. Graduates commit to a five-year placement at Chicago schools that are difficult to staff.
“Why can’t we do this on a larger scale?” asks Berry, a fan of the academy’s program. “This is not rocket science. It’s the right thing to do for the children.”
The rigor of alternate-route programs ultimately hinges on how much taxpayers are willing to invest, says Michael Allen, program director at the Education Commission of the States, based in Denver.
“I don’t think many people would dispute the notion that if we would treat teacher preparation like we treat medicine, they would be better prepared when they stepped into the classroom,” he says, adding: “I don’t think it’s going to happen any time soon.”
