Cutting teachers’ learning curve
Aspire's program offers master's and mastery
A bipartisan bill before Congress that’s drawing considerable attention would provide federal funding to states that establish academies and residency programs to train the next generation of high-striving teachers and principals in low-achieving districts. A residency program launched last year by Oakland-based Aspire Public Schools illustrates the type of program the legislation is intended to support.
The Aspire Teacher Residency Program trains and mentors teachers for placement in the charter network’s 34 schools in California. It offers a stipend to novice teachers the first year, while they are studying for their master’s in education, and builds in loan forgiveness to those who stay in the classroom.
Aspire, California’s largest charter school organization, reports that the program is showing promise as it heads into its second year. All 18 teacher residents have been hired to teach in Aspire schools, with 15 in the schools in which they were trained. This year, 19 new residents will start the program.
Like Teach for America, which draws top college graduates who commit to two years in the classroom, Aspire’s residency program is selective; it has accepted about one in seven applicants. But unlike Teach for America, which throws its corps members into the classroom after five weeks of summer training, Aspire’s residents had a full year of preparation before they went solo. And they’re asked to make a four-year commitment.
If the program proves to be a success, Aspire’s primarily low-income, minority students ultimately will see the benefits. “Great teachers have to be trained well,” says Heather Kirkpatrick, Aspire’s vice president of education, who said that Aspire expects it will see improved student achievement from teachers in their early years. Improved results, in turn, will reinforce to teachers that they should stick with teaching as a career. “Teachers stay when they feel effective,” she said.
Aspire’s teacher credentialing program is affiliated with the University of the Pacific. For four days every week, the teacher resident works in the classroom with a mentor teacher. (The biggest lesson from the first year, Kirkpatrick said, is that “being mentor teacher and sharing with a new person everything you do is an intense endeavor emotionally and physically.”) On the fifth day, Southern and Northern California cohorts of residents meet in all-day seminars with their UOP instructor. They also take online courses during the year. For Aspire, the program has the advantage of preparing teachers in the Aspire culture and pedagogy, with its focus on sending all students to a four-year college; traditional degree programs, preparing teachers who won’t know where they’ll be working, cannot do this.
At the end of the year, teacher residents receive a preliminary teaching credential – either a multiple subject credential for elementary and middle school or a single subject credential for high school – at a discounted UOP rate.
In the second and third years, now full-time teachers will continue to be guided by Aspire instructional coaches. For each year they teach, they receive $1,500 of reimbursement for tuition; it’s nearly 100 percent covered after six years.
In their first year, teacher residents get medical benefits and a $13,500 stipend. This is less than some well-established programs, such as the Boston Teacher Residency, offer, which means that residents will still have to take out loans or borrow money the first year. But Aspire, which established the program with grants from the Gates and Stuart foundations, budgeted assuming no outside help after five years. It will mostly pay for itself through reduced expenses for recruitment and training, Kirkpatrick said. Aspire also pays mentor teachers a stipend of $3,500.
Congress takes notice
Programs like these may get a new underwriter if Congress passes the Growing Excellent Achievement Training Academies for Teachers and Principals Act (GREAT Act), either as a stand-alone bill or as part of the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. The bill is sponsored by education’s heavy hitters in the Senate: Democrat Michael Bennet of Colorado and Republican Lamar Alexander of Tennessee; San Francisco-based NewSchools Venture Fund helped develop it. (Go here for a short summary of the bill.)
The federal government is currently underwriting about two dozen residency programs, primarily through $100 million in one-time stimulus money. The new bill would create competitive state grants, open to traditional university and alternative credentialing programs, for academy/residencies in high-needs areas that meet three criteria:
- They’re selective in their admissions;
- They provide hands-on, in-the-classroom training so that teachers are ready for the classroom the first day;
- In order to graduate, students must demonstrate, through their clinical work, they have the skills to raise student achievement (states will have to define how).
Aspire’s residency program appears to embody what the bill would demand: training that cuts the learning curve in schools that need excellent teachers from day one.
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Some implications of this Aspire project are interesting.
Aspire schools can already hire and fire whom they want, so the fact that they’re investing in this program makes it clear that they’ve learned that eliminating teachers’ job protection and due process rights is not a panacea.
Those who believe otherwise are acting on the assumption that there’s a ready pool of “great teachers” out there fruitlessly job-seeking, while lazy, burned-out deadwood occupies the teaching jobs. Clearly, Aspire management has learned that that’s not the case.
One “solution” that other charter operators rely on is Teach for America, obviously. But Aspire is clearly sending the message that TFA is not an effective source of reliably strong teachers — if it were, why would Aspire invest the resources in this project?
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I think you’ve missed the point, Caroline. All schools, whether charter or district, experience problems with a high rate of new teachers leaving the profession. They also face new teachers unprepared for the classroom — particularly in high-needs schools. There’s great hope that the residency model will work for all public schools. This is the model that TFA should be looking at, too — a three-year minimum program with the first year in training — instead of raising tens of millions of dollars to expand its current program.
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The San Francisco Unified School District, in conjunction with Stanford and the University of San Francisco, has begun a residency program for the SFUSD schools. Under the direction of Deborah Feigenbaum, the program had a successful initial year in 2010/2011. The goal is to prepare teachers in hard-t0-staff areas for the realities of teaching in the urban environment.
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I suppose if those teachers serve their careers in the Aspire charter world then they will be ok. But it was very disappointing to find out that the students I referred to the Aspire high school in Huntington Park (upon graduation from my public middle school) were soundly rejected due to low grades.
Charter school lite?
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The “residency” model of teacher preparation has been around for some time now, decades perhaps. Dominican College in Marin County has had a program in place very similar to the one described. Linda Darling-Hammond, who by all rights should be US Secretary of education, has been advocating a teacher preparation curriculum with guided practice from master teachers in a clinical model in her work. A number of CA State Universities has had something similar in place for several years and more are evolving in that direction.
It should be noted that this program is not just different from the Teach for America model, it is a total repudiation of the TFA model. So, if Aspire and the Venture Fund have not exactly been on the ground floor of developing the residency model, at least they admit to seeing through the TFA hype. Good on ‘em.
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Yes, I understand the reason Aspire is running the program, but those other issues are key too, because they damningly discredit some of the reformy articles of faith — and it’s a charter school doing the discrediting.
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As others have mentioned here, SFUSD has its own successful residency program. Not only does that program reach more students than Aspire’s, all of those students are local. And SFUSD is working with USF, the San Francisco Education Fund, and Stanford: all local institutions.
Residency programs seem to offer a promising new route to developing career educators. It’s a shame that this innovation is being linked only to charter schools, when local public school districts are heavily involved in their own efforts that will have a far greater impact on education locally.
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John and Caroline,
I think that this sort of system should be more of a model for how we train teachers in the US, somewhat like doctors with residency programs and internships. To make this happen, teachers will need to be paid more, and graduate schools of education will concurrently need to actually make requirements more competitive and raise their standards for entry into their programs, like those in high performing countries like Finland. Finland has the highest PISA scores in the world – partly attributed to their teachers, but also because they trust in their teachers to teach the whole child, not just test them. In fact, while the we go the way of testing and accountability, they decided that would be too costly as a nation, so instead they have put the trust in their local educational agencies and schools to meet the needs of their students with smaller classes and things we know that work. By the way, all their teachers must have master’s degrees; entry into their education programs is highly competitive and selective.
As far as charter go, they have their fair share of problems and this just came out to show that what many of us have speculated about, that charters turnover is much higher than regular public schools.
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2011/07/los-angeles-charter-schools-have-high-teacher-turnover.html
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