A System&apos;s View of California&apos;s Teacher Education Pipeline. Technical Report. Getting Down to Facts II
Author: Bell, Courtney A.
Date: 2018-09-00
Type: Reports - Research
Subjects: Teacher Education,Evaluation Criteria,Alignment (Education),Beginning Teachers,Elementary Secondary Education,Educational Policy,State Regulation,Readiness,Teacher Education Programs,Accreditation (Institutions),Community Colleges,Colleges

California's students have generally been making slow gains on nationally representative tests over the better part of the last 10 years. While these improvements are important, the gaps between subgroups of students are large and overall achievement places California in the lowest 10 percent of states (NCES, 2015). Given that teachers matter more to student achievement than any other school-based factor (Rivkin, Hanushek, &amp; Kain, 2000), one important policy lever for improving student learning is a strong teacher education system. If novice teachers are not prepared to meet all students' needs on day one, students' development is compromised. Novice teacher preparation is especially important to low-income, minority, and low-achieving students because their schools are disproportionately staffed by novices (Gagnon &amp; Mattingly, 2012; Krei, 1998; Lankford, Loeb, &amp; Wyckoff, 2002). To support California policymakers' efforts to improve the preparation of novices, we describe California's teacher education system, offering five criteria by which California might judge its success. We then evaluate the system's alignment, what we know about the degree to which it produces beginners who are ready to teach on their first day, and the degree to which there is data that can support pipeline institutions' efforts to improve the system. We find that the teacher pipeline should be thought of as a teacher education system comprised of institutions that provide novices with opportunities to learn the knowledge, skills, and capabilities in the California Standards for the Teaching Profession. K-12 schools play a large role in this system, teaching novices the K-12 curriculum, providing the learning context for all field placements, as well as providing mentor teachers for student teaching placements and induction mentors. Our evaluation of the teacher education system finds that policies and regulations are aligned with the state's teaching standards at a high level. However, this high-level alignment masks wide variation in ground-level implementation. It is unclear whether this ground-level variation influences beginners' preparedness. State reports and publicly available data suggest that no matter what path a novice takes through the teacher education system they are similarly prepared if they complete that pathway. They generally pass the required knowledge and practice-based assessments and they share the perception that they are well prepared to teach across the California standards. It is worth noting, however, that a sizable minority of multiple and single subject beginning teachers -- 37 percent in 2016-17 -- are teaching California's students before completing a pathway, an assurance of adequate preparation. In contrast to these patterns, principal survey data collected for this analysis suggest there are differences in the perceived preparedness of novice teachers. On average, compared to novice teachers, principals report lower levels of teacher preparedness among novices and perceive there to be variation in novices' preparedness across teaching practices. However, principals and teachers alike perceive teachers to have relatively lower levels of preparation to support students with special needs and relative strength in creating a positive classroom environment. Current data systems provide a good deal of standardized information about the knowledge teachers have after completing a pathway, but less information and less systematic information about what teachers are able to do on their first day of teaching. In addition to sparse systematic information on novices' capabilities, there are notable data constraints on the types of data available for improvement purposes. We conclude that policymakers and pipeline institutions do not yet have the information they need to rapidly improve the teacher education system. We consider how California might leverage its system of well-aligned standards, assessments, and requirements to create the additional data necessary to improve teacher preparedness across institutions in the teacher education system.