By Liam Goldrick, Director of Policy

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All across America, students and teachers are heading back to school. As the new year begins, more beginning teachers than ever before are standing at the front of classrooms.

More than 300,000 new teachers are starting work this fall - a nearly 50 percent increase from a decade ago. University of Pennsylvania professor Richard Ingersoll has chronicled this "greening" of the teaching profession.

This has major implications for students. New teachers, on average, are less effective than their more veteran colleagues. A learning curve tends to take place during their initial three-to-five years in the classroom. Novices typically struggle with classroom management and to meet the content, social and emotional learning needs of their students. And a disproportionate number of them are assigned to disadvantaged, high-poverty urban and rural schools and classrooms.

Nearly half of all new teachers will leave the profession by the end of their fifth year. This teacher attrition costs U.S. schools about $7 billion annually. But it's not just about money. High teacher turnover means that most students are increasingly likely to be taught by teachers who have not yet mastered their craft.

1.5 million students. (Read about just a few of the school districts and states where high-quality support is in place for new teachers for the 2013-2014 school year.)

Investing in support for the growing number of beginning teachers and school leaders represents one of the greatest opportunities for improving student outcomes in education today. While certain districts and states - including Hawaii, Maryland and Rhode Island in their Race to the Top projects - have made this a priority, typical states are backpedaling or have never established a policy to support beginning teachers.

To be clear: It is not new teachers who are failing our students - but our educational system that is failing our new teachers by forcing them to "sink or swim" without such critical, on-the-job assistance.

This growing cadre of beginning teachers in American classrooms demands a growing commitment to their unique learning needs from educational leaders and state and national policymakers alike. As we require and measure greater teacher performance through emerging evaluation systems, we need to be sure to set beginning teachers up for success-and not failure. After all, it's not just about their future in the teaching profession, but about their ability to provide effective instruction that their students require to learn and grow.

As Colorado considers an overhaul of its 20-year-old teacher licensure system next year, a working group established to guide this effort is drawing upon NTC analysis to inform its work. Increasing the Effectiveness of Educator Induction Programs in Colorado was completed by NTC on behalf of the Colorado Department of Education. The state's existing policy, based upon a 1991 law, requires induction support for all new educators, but lacks other key elements, including continued support for second-year teachers. In our final report to Colorado, NTC recommends that the state take six specific steps to improve program quality, mentor quality, state oversight and program funding. Read our report for more specifics.

The Greenfield School District hopes to use its new mentoring program to ease the transition into the Wisconsin Educator Effectiveness System.  The district has joined the Southeastern Wisconsin New Teacher Project (SEWNTP) consortium to help new teachers reach their goals through mentorship.  The consortium includes 26 school districts working in partnership with NTC and Cardinal Stritch University. 

In a recent news story, the district's director of curriculum, instruction, and assessment identified the benefits of the SEWNTP: reduced teacher attrition, greater intent to remain teaching, increased job satisfaction, accelerated new teacher growth and development, cost savings, higher student achievement gains, and ties to the state's educator effectiveness system.  The district superintendent said that the benefits of belonging to SEWNTP far outweigh the cost to the district. Wisconsin state policy requires school districts to provide a mentor to each beginning educator.

New Jersey hopes to improve the quality of teacher mentoring by changing the requirements for selecting and training mentors.  The state has long required districts to have a mentoring plan in place and provide mentors who advise and counsel novice teachers. However, state regulations have lacked specifics about what such a plan should include.   

The proposed regulations would include the requirements that mentors are teachers judged as "effective" or "highly effective" through new teacher evaluations, and mentor training would be required to cover specific topics.  If adopted, the new regulations would better align with NTC's state induction policy criteria 4 and 5 that require states to have a rigorous mentor selection process and provide foundational training and ongoing professional development for mentors. 

California's Teacher Credentialing Commission has embarked upon a two-year process to update and enhance the state's teacher preparation requirements. The Commission, led by Dr. Linda Darling-Hammond, plans to draw upon recommendations of State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson's recent Education Excellence Task Force on which NTC CEO Ellen Moir served. The overhaul will address possible changes to the state's induction program standards, including defining induction as two years of individualized support for participating teachers, clarifying and making more rigorous the expectations for mentors, and making candidate competency expectations more rigorous so that candidates are required to demonstrate competence prior to recommendation for the clear credential.

Earlier this month, the American Association of School Administrators released findings from its 15th survey on the impact of the economic downturn and related fiscal policies, like sequestration, on the nation's schools. It was informed by 541 respondents from 48 states.  Key findings include: 

• Sequestration cuts will translate into reductions in and eliminations to personnel, curriculum, facilities and operations. 59% will reduce professional development, 53% will eliminate personnel, 48% will increase class size, and 46% will defer technology purchase.
• State/local governments and school districts have very limited capacity to soften the cuts of sequestration.
• More then half (53%) of respondents reported that their budgets for the 2013-14 school year built-in cuts to offset sequestration. 
• Superintendents described efforts to offset cuts in 2013-14, but expressed concern about additional cuts in the future.  

Katherine Bassett, Executive Director at the National Network of State Teachers of the Year, has written a compelling story of the unintended consequences of teacher evaluation systems developed without teacher input.  In "Unintended Consequences", Bassett tells the story of a state teacher of the year (STOY) and finalist for National Teacher of the Year who by all other measures was validated as a great teacher but was deemed ineffective by the state's new teacher evaluation system. Because of this negative classification, the teacher could not serve as a coach or mentor for other teachers and had to make the difficult choice of leaving the classroom in order to have a leadership role in education. This, Bassett reports, is an unintended consequence of an evaluation system developed "with good intentions, but perhaps insufficient thought." The departure of the teacher whose story is told is not alone.  At least eleven STOYs are not returning to the classroom this fall.