At the Forefront of Educational Innovation
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By Liam Goldrick, Director of Policy
The Obama Administration has prioritized educational innovation during its time in office. It has used competitive grant programs through the U.S. Department of Education (ED) as a chief strategy to encourage and tap into the best ideas and innovations within the public and nonprofit sectors. For an impact-minded, growing national nonprofit organization like New Teacher Center (NTC), this injection of federal resources has been a boon to our work and to our partnerships across the nation.
Two recent reports have highlighted the success of NTC's endeavors to accelerate the effectiveness of beginning teachers through innovative, high-quality induction programs.
First, the ED's Year Three Race to the Top progress reports highlight our induction work with states including Hawaii, Maryland and Rhode Island.
The Hawaii progress report describes how the state has utilized NTC Hawaii to host "training for more than 500 current mentors who supported new teachers in SY 2012-2013 and additional training for new mentors in spring 2013."
The Maryland report summarizes how the state has provided effective support to teachers, specifically through NTC's induction partnership with the Maryland State Department of Education. "Maryland ... continued its work to address the needs of new teachers through its Teacher Induction Academy, which aims to ensure that all teachers have the opportunity to participate in a high-quality, supportive teacher induction program."
Rhode Island's RTT report notes that "in its second full year of implementation, the State's induction program enjoyed broad support from principals, beginning teachers and union leaders for its focus on formative coaching and job- embedded supports. The State matched 27 induction coaches with 412 first year teachers and 41 second year teachers for weekly support."
Second, Beginners in the Classroom - a report by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching - describes our teacher induction work with the Grant Wood Area Education Agency in eastern Iowa, funded through NTC's Investing In Innovation (i3) grant. "[M]uch effort goes into mentor selection at the Grant Wood AEA. Candidates are interviewed multiple times and required to give several model lessons and to provide assessments of student work... Completely freed from classroom duties for three years, each mentor works with up to 15 teachers in multiple schools. Having multiple charges, instead of just one, as in some other programs, gives the mentors a broad experience from which to draw. And it maximizes their influence." We talked about how important federal support is for such work to support new teachers in our blog post on the U.S. Department of Education, Office of Innovation and Improvement's website back in February.
As the federal government continues to seed such innovations, it must also attend to the needs of schools, districts and states across the nation that are not the immediate beneficiaries of such resources. That's why continued funding of existing formula programs, such as Title II, is critical. But so is advancing federal policy in a manner that ensures such resources are contributing to effective teaching and school success.
The lessons offered by these innovative educational initiatives must inform policy changes that are more likely to result in federal investments having a positive impact on teaching and learning. Establishing higher standards and expectations for the results of federal investments is more likely to enable teachers and students to meet the higher expectations that are being set for them.
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More Than 110,000 Teachers Surveyed Over Past Month
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Teachers report that they aren't being heard - but we are listening.
N TC has captured the voices of more than 110,000 educators in just two statewide teaching and learning conditions surveys. in North Carolina and Oregon, during March and April. More than 92,000 educators completed the North Carolina Teacher Working Conditions Survey and 19,369 educators responded to the inaugural TELL Oregon Survey. NTC's Teaching, Empowering, Leading and Learning (TELL) Survey asks educators questions about teaching conditions on key elements, including school leadership, teacher leadership, time, facilities and resources, induction, and professional development.
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Kentucky Bill Would Give Teachers Time to Collaborate
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Legislation (HB 202) that has passed the Kentucky House of Representatives, and is currently pending in the Senate Education Committee, would require that teachers are provided with 120 minutes per week for non-teaching activities. To make the case for this legislation, the bill's chief sponsor used data from the 2013 TELL Kentucky Survey to show that teachers could use more collaborative planning time.
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America Forward Coalition
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America Forward is a national non-partisan policy initiative, spearheaded by the nonprofit social innovation organization and venture philanthropy fund New Profit. Launched in 2007, America Forward helped inspire the creation of the White House Office of Social Innovation and Civic Participation and played a pivotal role in developing the Social Innovation Fund. NTC is a proud member of the New Profit portfolio of high-impact nonprofits and is an active participant in the America Forward Coalition, dedicated to driving systemic change in education.
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Projected Increase in New Teacher Hires
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The latest federal projections from the National Center on Education Statistics portent a major increase in new teacher hires over the next eight years. The number of new teacher hires in public schools is projected to increase 29 percent between 2011 and 2022, to 367,000. Despite a new analysis that suggests that new teacher retention increased during the recent economic downturn, the continued expectation is that an uptick in turnover combined with continued Baby Boomer retirements will fuel a rising populations of beginning teachers in the coming years. States and districts need to attend to support and assistance for these novice teachers within their educator effectiveness and talent development systems.
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Kiss My Grits
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Leave it to a teacher to channel her best Flo from Mel's Diner. (You remember the TV show, Alice, don't you?) Her message to those willing to force teachers to do more with less? Kiss my grits.
Kathleen Melville, a National Board-certified high school teacher in Philadelphia, writes in an Education Week Teacher blog: "[O]ur problem is not that we're not good enough at picking the people who can tough it out; our problem is that working conditions are so tough that not enough people want to go into teaching. It's one thing to be able to identify the grittiest new recruits, the ones with the greatest chance of surviving those tough first years; it's another thing to make teaching the kind of profession that attracts smart, reflective, highly educated people. I worry that too many reform efforts are focused on "getting the right people" and not enough are focused on building a profession that will sustain productive careers."
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Principals Pressed for Time
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A recent Education Week story shows how Principals Are Pressed For Time To Lead Instructional Change. Lesli Maxwell writes that this lack of time is "running headlong into the increasing demand for school leaders to be inside classrooms, watching and studying teachers, and helping them improve as part of new teacher-evaluation systems." On top of that, the article points to new research that suggests that even when principals spend more time inside classrooms, they are having no major impact on teaching or classroom learning. This has huge implications for the design and implementation of educator evaluation systems, including a need for better principal and evaluator training and the alignment of evaluation systems with induction and professional learning supports.
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Avoiding Teacher Evaluation Mistakes
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The latest edition of the AFT's American Educator features an article by Angela Minnici, director of the Center on Great Teachers and Leaders. In it she questions whether teacher evaluation systems, as currently designed and implemented, can improve teaching practice. Minnici offers 10 common missteps to avoid. These include approaching evaluation as a silver bullet, excluding educators from evaluation design, and decoupling evaluation from professional learning. At NTC we would offer an 11th: failing to differentiate evaluation for the needs of beginning teachers.
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Creating High-Quality Teacher Residencies
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The National Education Association's report, Teacher Residencies: Redefining Preparation Through Partnerships, summarizes a task force recommendation on how to best develop high-quality teacher residency programs. It describes two types of residency programs: undergraduate (bachelor's level) and post-baccalaureate residency. Regardless of the level, elements of the residency must include: active partnerships between preparation programs, districts, and stakeholders; selectivity of candidates; and academic coursework coordinated with the development and implementation of clinical 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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Newsletter Archive
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NTC Theory of Action
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Successful teacher induction systems focus on student learning and teacher effectiveness. Strong programs include instructional mentoring by carefully selected, well prepared, released mentors; professional learning communities for mentors and new teachers; engaged principals; and supportive school environments.
Download this resource
to learn more.
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Ellen Moir Honored With Education Award
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Last month NTC CEO Ellen Moir was awarded the 2014 Brock International Prize in Education. As reported in EdSource, Moir's work training and supporting new teachers goes back a quarter century in California.
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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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Job Openings
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NTC currently seeks qualified candidates for 11 positions:
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