I Hate the Way You're Not Around

There's nothing that will turn over preconceptions in today's IES report that found no difference between reading and math scores of students taught by teachers certified through traditional or alternative routes. The main conclusion is that there's simply not that huge of a difference between traditional and alternative certifications.

Part of the reason the certification route did not matter is simply that the teachers in them are not all that different: neither traditional nor alternative certification programs have particularly stringent entry requirements, leading to a group of prospective teachers who primarily come from schools that aren't particularly selective, who enter programs that also do not have stringent entry requirements, and who exit college with unspectacular GPAs (the study excluded prestigious alternative certification programs like Teach for America). If you want to learn where most of our teachers come from, look at a state's certification exam. New York has data from 2006-7 on the certification exam pass rates for all teacher education programs in the state. The top ten producers include names like NYU (487 test-passers) and Hofstra (562), but also lesser-known schools like the College of Saint Rose (620), Medaille (657), D'Youville (666), and Touro College-Manhattan (678). People forget that our teachers are as likely to come from Boricua College (18) as they are from Vassar (18) or from Saint Lawrence (30) as they are from Sarah Lawrence (12) of 10 Things I Hate About You fame. Teachers come from Elmira (92), Nyack (32), Pratt (22), Daemen (341), Keuka (58), Nazareth (328), Yeshiva (21), and the Dominican College of Blauvelt (36). It's hard to tell which of these are good or bad, alternative or traditional.

The other half of the equation is that the two words connote two very different program designs, when in reality there are not enormous differences. At the most basic level, we think of "traditional" programs as ones which combine content, methodology, and behavioral psychology into a bachelor's degree program. But traditional programs are not the same everywhere. Some require coursework equivalent to a college major, others to a minor, and some require prospective teachers earn a BA before even entering the program. The required course hours in the study varied from 240 to 1,380.

We think of "alternative" as the opposite to "traditional," a crash course for teachers to enter the classroom. But in the study, the required coursework varied here too, from 75 to 795 hours. In other words, the two terms are not mutually exclusive: 15 percent of alternatively certified teachers took more coursework than their traditionally certified peers.

These two reasons are the primary drivers for all the "no statistical differences observed" in the study. Among them:

• no difference between alternative and traditional certifications
• no difference between high- and low-credit alternative certifications
• no difference between high- and low-credit traditional certifications
• no difference in teacher learning curves
• no relationship between student scores and teacher training content, including pedagogy or fieldwork
• no benefit for teachers majoring in education

The only substantial difference the study found was between teachers currently taking coursework and those who are not. Students with teachers occupied with coursework scored lower than those with teachers who were not enrolled in classes.

Today's report does not lead to any new understanding of the teacher workforce, but it adds to the research showing little to no difference in the effects of the credentials teachers carry when they enter the profession. Consequently, it also adds greater urgency to figuring out better ways to evaluate, develop, and compensate our teaching talent.