National reform initiative promotes good teacher education
Education Professor Michael Kirst, left, and Eric Hanushek, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, analyzed California’s troubled public school finance system during a discussion at the School of Education.
BY LISA TREI
Good teacher training counts. Clare Kosnik knows that. For the last nine months, Kosnik and colleagues from across campus have been rolling out a new national reform initiative called "Teachers for a New Era" (TNE) that is designed to strengthen schools by analyzing what educators need to help their pupils succeed.
"We want to show that top teacher education programs make a difference, that graduates from the best programs are effective and that their pupils have higher achievement" rates than other students, said Kosnik, TNE's executive director. "We know there are some very poor quality teacher education programs. We want to say, 'Look at the difference between those who are trained by us and those who are trained with emergency credentials.' We want to say, 'If you want pupil achievement, you have to invest in teacher education and it must have these components.'"
According to education Professor Linda Darling-Hammond, a prominent advocate of teacher education reform, the Carnegie Corporation of New York launched the five-year project, with support from the Annenberg and Ford foundations, "to show what teacher education can become."
Stanford is one of 11 institutions nationwide that Carnegie selected to identify what types of teacher education work best. The member schools range from Stanford and its one-year Stanford Teacher Education Program (STEP), a master's program that enrolls only 70 students, to Michigan State University, which graduates more than 1,000 students annually. "To its credit, Carnegie is responding to critics of teacher education by saying, 'Let's identify great programs,'" Kosnik said. By including a range of schools, Carnegie is looking beyond local answers to common problems. "It shows their commitment to education in the broadest sense," she said.
At Stanford, with support from staff in the president's office, TNE aims to bring faculty from STEP together with professors across campus to work on program innovations and curriculum redesign.
Kosnik said efforts are already under way to add courses to the undergraduate curriculum geared to students who want to become teachers. For example, during Spring Quarter, history Professor Clay Carson taught African American History—The Modern Freedom Struggle, with a section of the weekly seminar aimed at students interested in education-related issues. English Professor Andrea Lunsford and education Associate Professor Arnetha Ball have developed a course called Ravenswood Writes, which trains undergraduates to tutor struggling writers in three area secondary schools.
TNE also plans to increase mentoring and support of recent STEP graduates, many of whom remain in the Bay Area and work in high-needs schools. "The biggest issue they face is fatigue," Kosnik said. "They need a safe place to ask questions where no one is assessing [them]."
Furthermore, in an effort to provide hard facts backed up by longitudinal research, TNE is gathering data to analyze the achievement differences between pupils taught by eight recent STEP graduates and eight teachers who did not attend the program. "No one in the world has tried to make these links backward," Kosnik said. "We know something happens with our graduates—we need to have a systematic way of studying it. We have only anecdotal evidence."
On campus, the initiative plans to raise the profile of teacher education as a career choice by including it in a freshman advising forum and by hiring staff to reach out actively to students. In addition, TNE has launched a public speaker series focusing on the crisis in American schools.
On April 25, education Professor Michael Kirst and Hoover Senior Fellow Eric Hanushek, two leading experts on education policy, analyzed California's troubled public school finance system during the inaugural TNE discussion in the School of Education. They agreed the system is broken. Kirst said California ranks about 25th nationwide in per-pupil expenditure, or 44th if cost of living is taken into account. Despite this, Kirst said, California's education accountability standards are among the highest in the nation. "California's funding is relatively so low, its standards are so high and the cost of doing business is so high that you have a gigantic gap," he said. Referring to the state's highly centralized school finance system, he added, "We need to throw out the whole thing and start again."
Hanushek said he is "stunned" by the low quality of California's schools. "There's a certain smugness in California about schools," he said. People say, "Well, we really have pretty good schools but we have so many minorities." Pointing to a chart, Hanushek said that California, home to one-eighth of the nation's children, does a poor job for all socioeconomic groups. In one analysis, he noted that the state's children of college graduates rank ninth-lowest nationwide in eighth-grade reading and 13th worst in eighth-grade math. "We have a system that is ineffective," he said. "We need to pay attention to teacher quality. That's the only place we know there is leverage in the system to improve performance."
Kosnik said this is where TNE fits in. "We know good teacher education makes a difference," she said. "We have to show how that works."