Preparing and Advancing Teachers and School Leaders, New Report

Posted by on October 14, 2013

A new report by the Education Trust finds too many educator-preparation programs inadequately train teachers for real-world challenges in the classroom or for districts’ hiring needs. It stresses that federal policy could improve educator quality by requiring more useful information on teacher- and leader-preparation programs, promoting meaningful action to improve low-performing programs, and sparking innovation in how districts and states manage educator pipelines. Through reauthorization of the Higher Education Act (HEA), the federal government can bolster state efforts to assess principal and teacher preparation and help states redesign both the teacher-talent pipeline and incentive systems that are currently dysfunctional. Ed Trust recommends that states be required to assess the performance of teacher and principal preparation on a range of output metrics, which should include tying student learning to graduates. This should be done as a condition of receiving federal student-aid funding. The federal government should also re-imagine the use of federal competitive dollars currently allocated in Title II — and supplement those with additional resources from ESEA Title II — to enable a select number of states each year, in coordination with districts and programs, to design and implement comprehensive redesigns of pipeline and advancement systems.

Read the report at http://www.edtrust.org/sites/edtrust.org/files/publications/files/Preparing_and_Advancing_0.pdf