Florida Teacher Preparation Programs Receive Scrutiny

July 26, 2011

What makes a teacher successful is a vexing question that has fueled major education reforms in recent years, from increased emphasis on testing, to the promotion of charter schools and the newfound popularity of teacher merit pay to provide an incentive for better instruction.

While teachers have endured the brunt of this scrutiny, the attention is now turning toward teacher preparation programs. In Florida, the effort to grade schools and districts by student test scores has begun to extend toward the programs that teach the teachers. Three years ago, Florida quietly became one of four states that tracks how well private and public universities and colleges prepare teachers for the classroom, using student FCAT scores as the yardstick.

These scores have largely been embraced by colleges, which closely watch how they rank compared to other schools. The results are often surprising, with the bigger state schools sometimes being out-performed by teachers from small colleges or even district-led programs that offer certificates to teachers while working in the classroom.

Nationally, groups like the National Council on Teacher Quality have launched an ambitious project to rate university and college teacher training programs in U.S. News and World Report by letter grade.

Last week, the group released an exhaustive, but controversial, report that scored student teacher programs throughout the nation, with the three Florida programs that were studied by the group faring well.

But Florida universities are uneasy about efforts from groups like the National Council on Teacher Quality to grade them, saying they are held accountable by the state, through accreditation and certification exam results.

Julie Greenberg, a senior policy analyst with the Washington, D.C.-based National Council on Teacher Quality, said the group had encountered “quite a bit of resistance,” from universities and colleges, with some refusing to furnish documents requested by the council. The project won’t be completed for several years.

Greenberg said the intent behind grading teacher preparation programs is to understand which colleges do a better job of training teachers, so that other programs may mimic their success.

But colleges and universities say they are already judged on student performance. Tom Dana, an associate dean with the University of Florida’s Department of Education, said “we have always been accountable.”

“Every program for teacher education has to undergo a rigorous review by state Department of Education as well as nationally,” Dana said. “We are nationally accredited.”

Deans at colleges of education throughout Florida say that what makes a teacher a good one is part science and part something less easy to pin down. “The problem in education is there is a general perception that it is something easy to do,” said Larry Scharmann, assistant dean of Florida State University’s College of Education and director of the School of Teacher Education. “If you have been through it yourself, you should be able to do it. That is simply not the case.”

Administrators said they feel teacher preparation programs have been swept up in a national education reform movement that emphasizes test scores, accountability and a closer scrutiny of teacher performance.

“I wish I knew why (we are targeted),” said Lois Christensen, the associate dean for Florida Gulf Coast University’s education program. “It appears to be politically motivated. I think there is a group of people out there, primarily conservatives, who are looking at this in more of a bean-counter way.”

Christensen said education is more nuanced than what numbers reveal, with a host of factors that can impact a teacher’s success, such as a student’s background and parental involvement .

Greenberg disagrees, saying there is evidence that points to the impact of a good teacher preparation program.

“It has become increasingly clear that teacher quality is one of the aspects of education that we can actually manipulate to good effect, to good effect on student performance,” Greenberg said.

Florida has conducted its own analysis of how well its schools do in training teachers.

Greenberg praised Florida’s attempt to track this data and said if more states embarked on this type of data analysis, it would make it easier to understand which teacher preparation programs were better than others.

Florida examines FCAT scores from first-year teachers who went to a state college, university or through a school district program. Some districts offer certification programs that allow teachers to earn certificates while working in the classroom.

This year’s data on university teacher training programs, based on FCAT grades from the 2009-10 school year, shows Florida Atlantic University and the University of North Florida produced teachers whose students perform better on the FCAT than other state universities.

Florida State University and the University of West Florida’s teachers didn’t perform as well.

Similar to school grades, the data appears to motivate colleges to perform better.

“We do pay attention to those numbers,” Scharmann said. “I don’t like to apologize when I see numbers like that. If (teachers) are coming out of Florida or FSU, we ought to do things as well or better than (other schools).”

Scharmann said he has vowed to get to the bottom of why FSU-trained teachers don’t fare as well.

Teachers trained through special on-the-job certification programs at colleges and districts were also studied. Some colleges, such as Pasco Hernando Community College, produced teachers who did astoundingly well, with more than half of the students showing learning gains on the FCAT.

In fact, most college and district teacher training programs performed about as well as the universities, with a few exceptions. Teachers trained in Bradford County schools, for instance, performed worse than most colleges and universities, while Collier County-trained teachers performed better than most colleges and universities.

The huge variety in test score gains shows what a complex issue teacher performance is, administrators say.

“It’s such a complex profession and I don’t think people realize that,” Christensen said.

By Lilly Rockwell
The News Service of Florida

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