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'Tis The Season
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Liam Goldrick, Director of Policy
In education policy, it's that time of year when our world falls in love with ... report cards. This month both Education Week's Quality Counts and the National Council of Teacher Quality's State Policy Yearbook were released.
NTC will be adding to the fray, with the release of our inaugural Review of State Policies on Teacher Induction in the next two weeks. (Attendees at the NTC National Symposium next week will get an early look! And subscribers to this newsletter will receive a special issue dedicated solely to this Review).
We believe that our analysis will provide the most comprehensive and accurate look at state policies on teacher induction and mentoring. It is based on 10 key policy criteria that you can read as part of individual state policy summaries, already available on the NTC web site. Accompanying those state summaries will be a policy paper that will summarize state policies, highlight leading examples, and provide recommended improvements.
Unlike Ed Week and NCTQ, however, NTC is not in the business of grading or ranking states. Rather, we have chosen to take a formative approach in helping states to identify areas of strength and weakness and offer our expertise to help them chart a course forward to improve new educator induction. We are engaged in exactly that kind of work in states such as Colorado, Illinois and Kentucky presently. We look forward to sharing our analysis and ideas with all of you!
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Induction a Major Focus in Illinois Race to the Top 3
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The U.S. Department of Education announced the recipients of the $200 million Race to the Top Round 3 (RTT3) in late December. RTT3 supports efforts to leverage comprehensive statewide education reform, while also improving science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education. Among the seven state recipients, Illinois stood out in carrying forward its commitment to educator induction and mentoring, proposed in its Round 1 and 2 Race to the Top applications, by including $3 million (the second largest line item) in its $42 million budget. The funds will help districts expand induction services and build the state's technical assistance and program accountability infrastructure. NTC, which has worked in Illinois since 2005, is pleased to see Illinois invest resources in supporting beginning educators.
Download Illinois' RTT 3 Application
Read the US DOE Press Release
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Rhode Island Induction Coaches Help New Teachers Improve
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Supported by Rhode Island's $75 million Race to the Top grant, induction coach Lillian Turnipseed, a veteran teacher of 38 years, works to accelerate new teacher development. She is responsible for a caseload of 14 beginning teachers and is one of 17 full-time induction coaches responsible for helping 270 new teachers throughout the state. Profiled in a recent Providence Journal article, Turnipseed focuses on listening to the teachers she mentors. "It's not always about having an answer or giving advice," she says. "It's about listening and allowing the teacher to talk through the situation."
Read the Full Article
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In Wisconsin ... Out with the Old, In with the New
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In Wisconsin, a looming "retirement tsunami" was exacerbated last year by the state's elimination of collective bargaining and deep cuts to the take-home pay of teachers. According to an analysis by the Wisconsin Association of School District Administrators (WASDA), the retirements of an estimated 3,400 veteran teachers removed decades of experience from state schools. Because the veterans are being replaced by first-year teachers, State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Evers told the Appleton Post-Crescent that "he would seek additional money in the next state budget to augment induction programs" for beginning educators. This retirement trend in Wisconsin squares with national data that shows that the modal classroom teacher in the U.S. has but one year of experience in the profession. That is a sharp departure from the 15 years of experience the average teacher had 20 years ago.
Read the News Story
Read the WASDA analysis
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"Movin' It" & "Improvin' It" Teacher Effectiveness Strategies
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Education policy expert Craig Jerald has written a paper for the Center for American Progress that discusses efforts across the country to overhaul teacher evaluation. Too often these reforms focus on "movin' it" strategies (recruitment and retention of more highly effective teachers and removal of less effective teachers) rather than on "improvin' it" strategies that aim to improve teacher effectiveness over time. The report suggests that policymakers should utilize both strategies. But the reality is that too few are. Jerald quotes an analysis by the National Council on Teacher Quality: "Many states are only explicit about tying professional development plans to evaluation results if the evaluation results are bad." As we wrote last June, embracing teacher development requires a fundamental belief that "teachers are learners" and - in the words of Jerald - that their effectiveness is "a mutable trait that can be improved over time."
Read the Paper
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Teacher Quality Matters
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Dr. Ada Beth Cutler, Dean of the College of Education and Human Services at Montclair State University in New Jersey, discusses the importance of providing teacher induction in this recent op-ed. Nearly 50 percent of U.S. teachers leave the teaching profession within their first five years. "In contrast to that alarming statistic," writes Dr. Cutler, "in school districts ... that use the New Teacher Center model of carefully selected, fully prepared mentor teachers coupled with standards-based protocols and instruments for observations and coaching, the retention rate for teachers is over 90 percent. In addition, first year teachers who have full-time, high-quality mentors working with them produce more learning gains for their students than other first year teachers."
Read the Op-Ed
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Huffington Post Interviews New Teachers on their Experiences
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Adam Wolf, a first-year Chicago Public Schools teacher, recently shared his experience being mentored through the Chicago New Teacher Center. The Huffington Post asked Adam and other first-year teachers what they learned during their first year of teaching. They discuss the challenges, rewards and lessons learned from working as beginning educators.
Read more about their experiences
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NTC Policy News is a monthly publication by the New Teacher Center. It is produced with funding support from the Joyce Foundation. Based in Chicago, Illinois, the Joyce Foundation invests in initiatives to improve public education and works to close the achievement gap by improving the quality of teachers in schools that serve low-income and minority children.
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e-Mentoring for Student Success is a Top Ed Tech Product
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Readers of eSchool News have chosen the e-Mentoring for Student Success (eMSS) program as a top educational technology product of 2012. The eMSS program started in 2002 as part of a five-year grant awarded by the National Science Foundation to NTC, the National Science Teachers Association, and Montana State University's Science/Math Resource Center. It matches secondary science teachers with online mentors and has expanded to include mentoring for math and special education teachers in more than 12 states.
Read the Article
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NTC CEO Ellen Moir Interview with Stanford Social Innovation Review
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In this interview, Moir discusses how she has combined her experience as a teacher and turned that into social entrepreneurship through her work as CEO and founder of NTC. Moir advises teachers who are thinking about starting down their own path of social entrepreneurship to begin to expose themselves to experiences outside the classroom and think about taking on a leadership role in their school. "That feeling in your gut is something you have to have, and I'd encourage teachers to act on it if it's there," Moir says. "You can always go back, but the door forward may close."
Read the Interview
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