Increasing the Quality of Teacher Education Programs

In the United States, when we think about the professions that are considered highly competitive and requiring the most training we think of doctors, lawyers and engineers. The teaching profession does not make this list. While teachers have one of the most important jobs—educating children to become successful and productive members of society—the programs that prepare them lack rigor and high standards for enrollment. As a result, teachers are increasingly unprepared to effectively educate their students when they get to the classroom. In a recent New York Times article “Train Teachers Like Doctors” Polakaow- Suransky, Thomases and Demoss pointed out that the United States is facing a shortages of teachers due to high turnover rates and low enrollment in teacher training programs. The response to this issue was to lower the standards for new teachers making it easier to become a teacher. There are now programs that allow people to become teachers with little to no training, and usually these teachers are assigned high poverty areas. When teachers are faced with educating students under the most challenging circumstances and with insufficient preparation, it is not surprising that the burn-out rates are so high.

By not investing in high quality teacher education programs, we are setting teachers up for failure. I remember when I was attending my teacher education program, I had a professor who told us very matter-of-factly that no one was a good teacher their first year.  He was trying to make a point about the importance of experience in becoming a highly effective teacher, and he was right in the sense that there are some things about teaching that you learn best through experience. However, I do believe there is a certain amount of instruction and hands on training that is required in order for new teachers to manage a classroom and implement effective teaching practices. While first year teachers may not be highly effective, they should not be failing to educate their students. It is essential that new teachers start their careers with enough training to keep them from burning out before they gain the experience that makes the highly effective. There are so many teachers who have the potential to be highly effective but because they lack minimum training necessary, they burn-out and leave the profession before they reach that potential. This results in high teacher turnover rates especially in low income areas that need have the greatest need for stability and experienced teachers. It is completely counterintuitive that the most inexperienced and underqualified teachers are teaching in schools that have the greatest need for high quality education. This is yet another example an injustice suffered by high poverty populations.

The article highlighted several teacher education programs that are models of effective teacher preparation. The teacher education programs that produced teachers who stayed in their profession and demonstrated high student achievement rates all required lengthy co-teaching residencies. These “residencies” are different than that of traditional student teaching in that they are yearlong and provide more opportunities to take on all the responsibilities of teaching. In many of the fast-tracked teacher education programs the student teaching is brief and limited to observing veteran teachers and teaching short supervised lessons. In order to prepare teachers to meet the needs of our students and provide them with a high quality education, we must raise the standards for teacher preparation programs so that they are on par with those of doctors and lawyers.

 Link to New York Times Article http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/08/opinion/train-teachers-like-doctors.html