Rookie teachers are much less effective than their more experienced colleagues, a new report says, pointing to a need for better preparation for prospective teachers and for more support once they're standing in front of classrooms.
As North Carolina looks to improve public school students' achievement, the report from University of North Carolina researchers makes an important link between where new teachers are educated and how their students perform on standardized tests.
Education leaders and policymakers are focused on teacher effectiveness as a key to improving student performance. Good teachers lead to measurable student gains, while students who have ineffective teachers can lose ground.
"The results are surprising, to say the least," said Hannah Gage, chairwoman of the UNC system Board of Governors. "They shatter a lot of our preconceived ideas about what it takes to truly prepare a teacher."
The study, presented to the board Thursday, showed that teachers who graduated from the state's public universities were in the middle of the pack in terms of effectiveness, while teachers who are in the Teach for America program excel in high school classrooms and in teaching middle school math. Students in Teach for America teachers' middle school math classes get the equivalent of about 90 extra days of learning.
Teach for America is a national nonprofit that recruits college graduates to teach in schools with low-income students. Teach for America teachers are employed in Charlotte-Mecklenburg and in 12 Eastern North Carolina school districts, but they make up a tiny percentage of the work force.
Ideas for improvement
The results pointed to a number of areas where the universities and the state Department of Public Instruction can look to improve teacher preparation. For example, the UNC system is working with DPI on a plan to support new teachers in their first three years on the job. The UNC system is also interested in replicating what it can from Teach for America's teacher preparation.
"Our teachers aren't dummies," said UNC system President Erskine Bowles. "Our teachers are pretty smart. That's not the problem. It's how you train them - how you select them."
The study looked at student scores on end-of-grade and end-of-course tests and connected that information to their teachers, how long they'd been teaching and where they learned to teach. The focus was on teachers with less than five years experience. All school districts were included.
Rookie teachers are less effective in nine out of 11 measures. Elementary school math students in inexperienced teachers' classrooms lose the equivalent of 21 days of school, and middle school math students lose the equivalent of 47 days of school.
Practice is key
Lindsey Evans of Cary recently won an award from the Wake County district given to first-year teachers. Evans, an N.C. State University graduate who teaches eighth-grade social studies at Apex Middle School, said she was a student teacher in both the subject and grade she now teaches. UNC researchers said that factor was important.
"There's a huge difference between a sixth-grader and an eighth-grader," Evans said.
She also said she has a lot of support from experienced teachers at Apex Middle, including her mentor and the teacher in whose class she worked while in college. One reason some teachers struggle is that they don't have anyone they can turn to with questions, she said.
Who needs a boost?
Teachers who attend out-of-state colleges then move to North Carolina to teach perform worse than UNC-system graduates in elementary school math and reading and in high school math and social studies. Wake County and Charlotte-Mecklenburg have some of the highest concentrations of teachers hired from out-of-state.
Lateral-entry teachers, those who have college degrees but not teaching credentials, are concentrated in small districts such as Bertie, Halifax and Pasquotank counties. They performed worse than UNC-system graduates in two of 11 measures, notably in high school classrooms. Lateral-entry teachers in high schools teach 37 percent of students taking classes with end-of-course exams.
"We're concentrating lateral-entry teachers in places where they're least effective," said Gary T. Henry, director of the Carolina Institute for Public Policy at UNC-Chapel Hill and one of the report's authors.
