Opinion

A Call to Action on Teacher Quality

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By John Russell

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Acknowledging the importance of teacher quality, the Federal No Child Left Behind Act required that by 2005-06 all children should be taught by “highly qualified” teachers in the core academic subjects.

The disturbing reality is that teacher preparation programs simply have not and still do not sufficiently prepare new teachers for the classroom and that state licensing examinations are not rigorous enough to protect students from teachers who are ill-equipped to teach. As is clear from the examples listed below, failure to adequately prepare teachers has had disastrous consequences for general education students and for learning disabled students in particular: 

Clearly, things have not improved in the years since the No Child Left Behind Act.

Tragically, far too many teachers are not being adequately prepared to become even effective teachers, let alone “highly qualified” ones. In 2014, the National Council on Teacher Quality released its annual review of teacher preparation programs in the United States. As was the case in previous studies, colleges and universities were once again cited for their substandard preparation of teachers. There remains a significant disconnect between the preparation teachers need to be successful and the preparation they actually receive in their pre-service and graduate education courses. Of great significance to all parents, and especially to parents of learning disabled students, the National Council on Teacher Quality evaluated 687 college and university pre-service teacher education programs that prepare teachers to teach students who are identified as “struggling readers” and found that 75 percent of these programs did not meet the basic standards set by the council.

The International Dyslexia Association bolsters these conclusions by citing research findings (Mather, Bos, & Babur, 2001; Moats, 1994, 2009; Spear-Swerling, 2009) confirming “…that many teachers, even those with experience and credentials, have limited knowledge about phonemic awareness and phonics and their importance for students at risk for reading problems.” Researchers have also found that 75 percent of the students who drop out of school have reading problems (Joshi, et. al, 2009), further underscoring the link between the lack of quality in programs designed to train teachers to teach reading and future student performance. Other researchers have found that learning disabled students whose teachers had greater knowledge of reading concepts scored better on reading achievement tests than their peers whose teachers were less informed. Although teachers that lack adequate preparation disproportionally harm students with disabilities, there are serious negative consequences for all students, as well as for the teachers themselves, who suffer the professional and emotional burden of not being able to adequately support the children they work so hard to teach.

Even in the face of overwhelming evidence of the lackluster preparation of teachers and its dire effect on students, colleges and universities have been notoriously slow to change their pre-service programs. While The National Reading Panel issued its report in 2000, currently there are only 25 colleges and universities accredited by the International Dyslexia Association as meeting the standards set out by that panel of distinguished reading scientists. Many, but certainly not all, state education departments, school districts and individual schools have given inadequate responses to the poor quality of teacher preparation. To change this, states must make teacher-licensing examinations far more rigorous and based on research-based educational practices, which, in turn, will have a ripple effect on colleges and universities. The economic reality is that for undergraduate and graduate programs to stay competitive their curricula will have to be altered in order for their graduates to pass the more demanding exams. Given the glacial pace of academic change, this will, no doubt, take time.

In the interim, if the quality of teaching is going to improve, political and educational initiatives need to be advanced, and parents must become better informed and politically active advocates for their children. Dyslexia Awareness Day at the state Capitol on April 4 aims to educate legislators and help parents and students advocate for better identification of dyslexia and preparation of teachers in training. If schools are going to improve the quality of teaching, comprehensive professional development is an absolute necessity. Dedicated, conscientious teachers can mitigate deficiencies in their preparation through professional development, but only if professional development programs are more rigorous and of a better quality than the undergraduate and graduate programs that are responsible for the deficits in the first place. In response to this reality, my school, The Windward School in White Plains, has established a professional development program that is comprehensive, demanding, and extremely effective in closing the knowledge gap between research and teaching practices. Other schools have followed a similar path in their efforts to improve teacher quality and student achievement.

While the issues influencing teacher quality are complex, the response of dedicated and well-informed parents, teachers and schools can result in positive change. Margaret Meade said it well: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.”

John J. Russell, Ed.D., is the head of The Windward School in Manhattan and White Plains.

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