2013 International Summit on the Teaching Profession
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Eric Hirsch, Chief External Affairs Officer
 Last week I had the distinct opportunity to attend the 2013 International Summit on the Teaching Profession in Amsterdam. The Summit -- bringing together the ministers/secretaries of education and union presidents from 20 countries,150 Dutch teachers and a few hundred other stakeholders and organizations from around the world -- focused on teacher evaluation.
Estonian Minister of Education and Research Professor Jaak Aaviksoo framed the conversation by asking whether countries would, "create more and better rules [to monitor teachers] or figure out how trust people in everyday life." It was the major theme of the Summit: Should countries have sophisticated, centralized evaluation systems with clearly defined measures and processes, or should teachers in schools and localities work to collectively define their standards, their evaluation, their development, and ultimately their own profession?
Read Eric's Full Blog Post
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Keep the Promise to California's New Teachers and Their Students
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California's nationally recognized Beginning Teacher Support and Assessment (BTSA) program is at risk. That's bad news for beginning teachers--and for the students they teach. NTC Director of Policy Liam Goldrick recently published an op-ed on the EdSource website explaining why and detailing how California can reclaim its mantle of leadership on new teacher induction.
Read the Op-Ed
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You Better Start Listening To Teachers
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On his Education Week blog, former National Education Association executive director John Wilson recommends that schools survey teachers through the NTC's Teaching and Learning Conditions initiative and that they use the data "to make substantive changes in the school environment." The voices of more than 100,000 educators already are being heard this spring through our Teaching, Empowering, Leading and Learning (TELL) surveys in the states of Colorado, Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, Ohio, Tennessee and Vermont.
Read the Blog Post
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Supporting Teachers to Implement the Common Core
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The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) require all teachers to build their students' literacy skills, including argumentation -- defending a claim about any idea, process, or outcome. The standards also require a different approach to developing students' ability to master math concepts and problem-solving processes that serve them beyond the classroom. In a recent Hunt Institute blog post, several NTC colleagues discuss ways to support teachers in implementing the common core.
With the generous support of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, NTC is at the forefront of a pilot that helps teachers apply rigorous instruction aligned with CCSS. Through NTC's e-Mentoring for Student Success (eMSS) new Explorations programs in science and math, teachers are building their capacity to understand and implement CCSS based on tasks developed by the Literacy and Math Design Collaboratives (LDC, MDC). In addition to eMSS Explorations, which will eventually support all subject area teachers, NTC also helps elementary teachers build CCSS-informed language development practices via an Oral Language Development website.
Read the Blog Post
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Oregon Aims to Invest in Beginning Teachers
| | Kudos to Oregon for not debating whether, but how, to invest in new teachers. A proposal by Governor John Kitzhaber and Chief Education Officer Rudy Crew to create several regional centers to train teacher and administrators may be bypassed, reports The Oregonian, in favor of "expanding the initiatives in Oregon that are already starting to work. That includes mentoring for more new teachers."
As other states strip funding for the induction of beginning teachers or waive requirements that districts provide such support, Oregon appears poised to preserve its $5 million investment in its beginning teacher and administrator mentoring program. Governor Kitzhaber and the Oregon Education Investment Board, key state legislators, and many education and teacher organizations have demonstrated critical leadership on this issue, including supporting proposals to sustain and expand funding for this initiative since its inception in 2007.
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Future of STEM Education Discussed at White House
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With President Obama's goal of training 100,000 science, technology, engineering and math teachers over the next 10 years, Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, John P. Holdren
hosted a roundtable on March 18 to discuss the future of STEM education. The Howard Hughes Medical Institute announced that morning that it would donate $22.5 million to the National Math and Science Initiative to scale up the UTeach Program. UTeach was established in 1997 at the University of Texas, Austin, and the UTeach Institute was created in 2006 to replicate the program that allows students to simultaneously earn a teaching certificate and a Bachelor's degree in science, technology, engineering, or math.
NTC is a member of the 100k in 10 network, dedicated to strengthening teaching and learning in the STEM subjects.
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Using Teacher Evaluation to Promote Professional Learning
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A recent commentary in Education Week, written by Angela Minnici, Director of the Center on Great Teachers and Leaders at the American Institute for Research (AIR), and Ellen Behrstock-Sherrat, Senior Policy and Research Associate at AIR, suggests a two-pronged approach to developing a system that focuses on support and growth for all teachers. First, move the policy dialogue away from teacher evaluation alone and focus on how evaluation can serve to deliver the supports, strategies, and resources needed to develop all teachers. Second, connect new evaluations to a broader talent-management system that includes supports which are continually assesses and revised.
Read the Commentary
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International Approaches on Using Evaluation to Improve Teaching
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Our feature story this month chronicles learnings from the 2013 International Summit on the Teaching Profession. But the background report for the Summit itself also is worth reading. It notes the wide variation in policy and programmatic approaches to evaluating teachers, but notes the importance of the endeavor "to support continuous learning for individual teachers throughout a career and for the profession as a whole." The report analyzes 24 international approaches to teacher evaluation, looking at standards and governance, procedures (including observation, student results and surveys), capacity, use of evaluation results, and building or aligning evaluation into a broader system.
Read the Report
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State Perspectives on ESEA Waivers
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 The Center on Education Policy has released a new report, States' Perspectives on Waivers: Relief from NCLB, Concern about Long-Term Solutions. The report outlines results of a survey from 38 states regarding their early experiences in applying for waivers from key accountability requirements of ESEA and their plans for implementing new approaches. Among several key findings, the survey revealed that the waivers have shaped state policies and accelerated reform. They have enabled states to move forward with implementing teacher and principal evaluation systems despite resistance from teachers, teachers' unions, and administrators. However, state officials remain skeptical about what will happen to the programs and policies in their waiver plans if ESEA is reauthorized.
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Supporting Teachers is Crucial to Education
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In this Take Part op-ed, Montgomery County math content coach and former U.S. Department of Education Teaching Ambassador Fellow Greg Mullenholz writes about the struggle teachers currently face to adapt and adjust to the latest evaluations and standards. Consequently, teachers' job satisfaction is at an all-time low. Professional development needs to be an ongoing process and embedded in evaluation systems that ultimately helps increase student achievement, Mullenholz writes. "I'm tired of losing great colleagues and our students are tired of losing great teachers. The work is hard, but evaluating teachers poorly and not providing them with opportunities for meaningful, targeted development makes the long-term problem much harder to deal with: a generation of students not prepared for the rigors of the global workforce."
Read the Op-Ed
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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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Newsletter Archive
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February Policy News Update
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In last month's edition of NTC Policy News, we wrote about the progress made in Race to the Top states through the year 2 reports submitted to the U.S. Department of Education. According to Rhode Island's report, we noted that induction coaches provide 75 minutes of mentoring support to new teachers every week. In practice, Rhode Island is actually providing 90 minutes of weekly mentoring support to new teachers.
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Illinois Guide for Evaluating and Supporting Beginning Teachers
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Download a copy of our recently published policy guide, Cultivating Effective Teachers Through Evaluation and Support: A Guide for Illinois Policymakers and Educational Leaders. It explores how Illinois can solidify the 2010 Performance Evaluation Reform Act's (PERA) role in informing and supporting new teacher development. It offers lessons of interest to other states that are reforming teacher evaluation systems.
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NTC News Updates
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Read about NTC's latest news updates and media coverage here.
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NTC Job Openings
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NTC seeks qualified candidates for the following positions.
Current Postings:
-Development Associate |
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About Us
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