New MPS Teachers Speak Out on Their Training

When leaders in the Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS) and other Wisconsin school districts set about hiring new teachers, where should they look to find the candidates who are most likely to do a good job of improving their students’ academic learning? There are several possibilities. In Wisconsin alone, 32 colleges and universities, public and private, offer training programs leading to initial certification for teaching in the state’s kindergarten to grade 12 (K-12) schools. These programs are alike in many ways, since all of them must meet the state’s program-approval standards, but they are by no means identical. They vary in their stated goals, admission standards, curricular emphases, course requirements, and in the profiles of the faculty members who design and conduct the programs. It seems plausible, therefore, that the various programs also would differ in their effectiveness—some outperforming others in producing teachers who know how to improve students’ academic achievement. To the extent that they differ in this respect, it also would seem plausible that school districts would take account of the differences, striving to hire graduates from those programs known for their strong, positive training effects.

After all, the stakes are high. It matters a great deal who gets hired to teach, especially in large urban school districts struggling to improve graduation rates and achievement levels. Notwithstanding the influence of homes and neighborhoods, teacher quality has a powerful effect on students’ academic achievement. One study has shown that, for children fortunate enough to have good teachers throughout their years in school, the effects of good teaching can substantially offset or even eliminate the disadvantage ordinarily associated with growing up in a poor socio-economic environment.[i] The potential implications of such findings are enormous. Imagine, for example, the personal and societal benefits that would follow if parents and principals in Milwaukee could be confident that all the district’s elementary school teachers could be counted on to produce large academic gains, year after year.

Unfortunately, school districts, to date, have had no reliable basis for making well-informed judgments about the effectiveness of the many teacher training programs whose graduates they might consider for employment. Information about effectiveness has not been available. One reason is simply that, until recently, there has been nothing that could serve as a valid outcome measure of K-12 achievement gains linked to the practice of particular teachers, and nothing, therefore, to correlate with the teacher training programs in question. As a result, the teacher training program of a given college or university might acquire a positive or a negative reputation in a particular school district for purely idiosyncratic reasons—institutional proximity, for example, fostering friendly or unfriendly personal and professional relationships between parties on both sides—unrelated to program effects.

Today, however, these circumstances have begun to change, thanks to new developments in state policy and education research. One development has to do with the establishment of statewide curriculum standards and assessment programs. Wisconsin, along with most other states, has adopted a system of statewide curriculum standards for grades K-12, along with an assessment system linked to those standards. Not everybody is satisfied with the standards or the assessment system, but taken together they provide, for the first time, a basis for assessing how K-12 students in the state are doing by reference to formally established standards. By itself, however, this new means of assessment cannot provide answers to questions about the capacity of Teacher X to improve students’ achievement, since levels of achievement for a given student in a given year might reflect outside the teacher’s control—for example, previous years of good teaching or poor teaching for which the teacher should not be credited or blamed. To deal with this problem, we need a way to determine the extent to which a teacher improves students’ achievement during the time she or he is their teacher.

Could Things be Different?

Our purpose is to determine how effectively schools of education in Wisconsin prepare elementary school teachers to teach in MPS. We undertake the task in light of this context:

• Teacher quality is an important determinant of student achievement.

• Many elementary school teachers who may seem qualified because they pass state certification tests actually have SAT mean scores that are well below the average SAT scores of other college graduates.

• Many faculty members in schools of education are more interested in social and political issues than they are in educating effective teachers—teachers who can improve the achievement levels of their students.

• MPS is in great need of being able to hire smart, academically talented teachers.

• As of today, it is difficult for anyone to know whether schools of education are preparing effective teachers, or to what extent. Objective data are hard to come by, and the very notion that hiring might be guided by such data is unfamiliar.

Could things be different? Yes, but a significant change would require changing the subject. Our public interest in quality education calls for a marked shift in emphasis within departments and schools of education—away from contextualizing and ideology, toward a new focus on the knowledge and teaching skills new teachers need to improve the academic achievement of their students. No conceptual or technical problem stands in the way of making the shift. The steps to be taken are ones that many educators could take, if they chose to do so. The question is whether teacher trainers and education researchers can put aside their own special interests—political and theoretical—in order to focus on teaching practices known to be effective.

We know from ordinary observation that faculty members in some university departments with professional training missions are capable of focusing their effort in this way. Anecdotes prove nothing general, but they do illustrate possibilities. One of us conducted a review of a department outside the School of Education at UW-Milwaukee a few years ago. Faculty members in this department were a lot like other university faculty members. They tended to be political liberals and, judging by the signs and cartoons on their office doors, they were not friends of George Bush or the Republican Party. But in their work as instructors of undergraduates in a professional training program they were completely dedicated to their department’s mission of helping people overcome particular disabilities. Working from a common knowledge base, they focused on training people who could go into the field and get their jobs done right. No such consensus—of purpose or method—exists in schools and departments of education. There faculty members can’t even agree that using scores from the state’s own curricular examinations is a legitimate way to measure academic achievement, even though doing so has been mandated by state policy.

Teachers Rate Their Training

As part of a larger study to assess the effectiveness of new teachers in MPS[ii] we conducted a survey in cooperation with the MPS Division of Assessment and Accountability to find out how new MPS teachers rate their teacher training programs.

We distributed a cover letter inviting all MPS elementary school teachers with up to six years of experience (1,576 teachers) to participate in an online survey about their training programs. One hundred ninety one teachers, or approximately 12 percent of the eligible pool, provided complete survey responses for use in our analysis. The margin of error for our calculations is 6.65 percent at a 95 percent confidence level.

Because the sample size was small for many of the individual teacher certification programs, we grouped the schools into five categories: UW-Milwaukee, representing 36 percent of the sample; all other (non-UW-Milwaukee) Wisconsin public colleges and universities, representing 15 percent of the sample; Wisconsin private colleges and universities, representing 24 percent of the sample; colleges and universities not in Wisconsin, representing 5 percent of the sample; and teachers trained at the Milwaukee Teacher Education Center (MTEC), an alternative training program for teachers in the MPS,[iii] representing 21 percent of the sample.[iv] Even with these groupings, some samples remain small.

Here is a summary of the survey results.

• Overwhelmingly, new MPS elementary school teachers rated their clinical experiences (i.e., student teaching) as the most valuable components of their training programs.
• New MPS elementary school teachers rated their general professional education courses as the least valuable component of their training programs. An examination of several syllabi for philosophical and cultural foundations courses suggests there is little agreement among instructors on what should be included in such courses. The topics vary widely. The syllabi also suggest a pervasive left-wing political bias in these courses.
• New MPS elementary school teachers rated their academic (non-education) courses as being the second-least valuable component of their training programs—far behind clinical experiences and teaching methods courses.
• New MPS elementary school teachers tended to rate their general teaching preparation quite positively. Over 70 percent felt that they were sufficiently prepared for their first teaching assignment, and 70 percent felt they had sufficient teaching skills to be successful in the classroom. Over three fourths believed that they had sufficient content knowledge.
• New MPS elementary school teachers trained at UW-Milwaukee rated their general preparation for teaching less favorably than others questioned in our survey. About 60 percent of teachers from UW-Milwaukee felt that they were sufficiently prepared for their first teaching assignment, and about 60 percent felt they had had sufficient overall teaching skills.
• How well do elementary school teachers feel they are prepared to teach in MPS? On average, about two thirds of the teachers believed they were able to deal with the diversity of students in their classrooms, and over half felt prepared to work in a large urban district like MPS. However, less than half believed they were well prepared to handle classroom management tasks.
• Regarding diversity and overall preparation to teach in MPS, teachers trained at UW-Milwaukee rated their program nearly as favorably as teachers from the other programs. Teachers trained at UW-Milwaukee rated their preparation to manage their classrooms less favorably than teachers from other programs.
• Teachers trained in the MTEC program rated their preparation to teach in MPS higher than other teachers rated their programs. Nearly 78 percent of the MTEC teachers felt well prepared to deal successfully with diversity, and nearly 73 percent felt they had sufficient management skills. Eighty percent of the MTEC teachers felt well prepared to work in a large urban district like the MPS. Given these positive results, one might anticipate that MTEC teachers would produce higher student achievement gains than teachers prepared in other programs. Unfortunately, this is not the case. The valued-added methodology (VAM) analysis showed that MTEC teachers are as effective as others.
• Nearly 90 percent of the teachers agreed that teaching to increase academic achievement is the central goal of a classroom teacher. However, only 66 percent of the teachers overall believed that their programs did a good job of preparing them to raise academic achievement. The percentages were lower for UW-Milwaukee trained teachers (60 percent) and lower still for MTEC teachers (52 percent).
• Asked whether they would recommend their teacher certification program to others, almost 73 percent of the teachers trained in all the programs agreed that they would. However, teachers from UW-Milwaukee were less positive. Only 63 percent of the UW-Milwaukee teachers agreed that they would recommend their program. A somewhat higher percent (70) of the MTEC teachers agreed.

Recommendations and Conclusions

While our study overall suggests many possible areas for improvement, we choose to refrain from emphasizing a laundry list of specific recommendations for fine tuning Wisconsin’s teacher preparation programs as they relate to MPS. Why? Partly because recommendations of this sort are old news. Similar recommendations have been proposed, and ignored, for a long time. Also, traditional teacher training programs today are restricted in ways that are almost too numerous to count. In other words, it is hard for us to imagine that the system can change itself by adoption of measures aimed at fine tuning. PI 34—the state’s rules governing teacher training—tie the enterprise up and buttress the status quo. Almost always, when leaders at traditional teacher training programs are challenged to defend their programs in response to student or parental complaints, they take refuge in the rules, pointing out they are just following the mandates of PI-34.

It gets worse. Tenure protection for senior faculty members makes it difficult to redesign or abolish certain courses in the teacher preparation program, no matter what program graduates think of them. Those courses belong to somebody, and he or she doesn’t want to lose them. Similarly, college and university chancellors and presidents would be hard pressed to imagine why they should increase admission standards for schools and departments of education when such actions would almost certainly result in reduced enrollments and less revenue for the institution. And throughout the UW system all the issues surrounding “faculty governance” add to the bureaucratic inflexibility, which makes it almost impossible for schools and departments of education to embark on truly innovative approaches.

Our primary recommendation is not for fine tuning. It is that the state of Wisconsin should push its teacher training schools to change the subject—that is, to focus effort and resources sharply on the task of teaching new teachers how to improve the academic achievement of their students, in urban schools and elsewhere. Suitable programs would share many of the features that now exist in charter schools. Toward this end, exemptions from DPI rules should be issued as necessary. A state board— perhaps one appointed by the Board of Regents—could accept applications from interested institutions. New programs would be allowed to experiment. They would be supported in their efforts to attract bright, capable people from any background to serve as leaders. They would set new standards for teachers, admitting only candidates who stood out as smart, well educated, and hard-working. They would feature intense internships (taking a cue from MTEC) rather than traditional models of student teaching. Their programs would focus on the curriculum and standards for which new teachers would actually be responsible when they begin to teach. And they would strive in all these efforts—and others of their devising—to validate their practices by reference to empirical evidence about the known effects of those practices on students’ academic achievement. National partners such as Teach for America—a program that attracts thousands of college graduates, many from UW-Madison,[v] to teach in urban schools—might be an excellent model.

We also offer two other recommendations.

• Wisconsin, perhaps at the direction of the Board of Regents, should establish a way for officials in school districts such as the MPS and the general public to learn about the quality of teachers produced by Wisconsin’s traditional and alternative certification programs. Information regarding performance on content tests, pass rates, number of professional education credits, number of content courses, types and intensity of clinical experiences, and so forth should be easily available. Results of VAM studies, which measure the relationship between teacher training programs and their impact on student performance, should be readily available.

• The UW system should take the lead in demanding a new level of accountability to departments and schools of education. What better way to do this than to demonstrate that teachers trained at some institutions add more value year to year in terms of academic gains than do teachers trained at other institutions? Wisconsin’s researchers should initiate local and statewide VAM studies of graduates from all schools and departments of education as well as alternative certification programs. Such studies could address what features of specific teacher preparation programs contribute to achievement gains in the classroom.

Mark C. Schug, Ph.D. is Professor Emeritus, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

M. Scott Niederjohn, Ph.D. is Charlotte and Walter Kohler Professor of Business and Economics at Lakeland College in Sheboygan, WI.