Mentoring - strike 2

Mentoring and induction are one of the ‘knowns’ in education. You just know it works and the more you give the better teachers will perform and the longer they will stay in the classroom. A given – just like child psychology, the history of teaching, student teaching and other courses that are absolutely required to ensure you get a great teacher.

Except they don’t really seem to help

IES with the second year of a study on extensive mentoring and once again it shows that there is no real difference for student achievement and no impact on retention. Wow.

A while back I wrote about the first year of this study and the flaws of the study were pointed out by Liam Goldrick from The New Teacher Center. He points out that the mentoring was not the pure New Teacher Center program and it was the first year. So the first flaw still applies – but the second, not so much.

To us the headline is that big, formal, costly programs do no better then the informal, helping each other out stuff that is happening in more and more schools. However – there are still too many schools where teachers are still very much on their own.

The conclusion is: no conclusion. Generalizing from one study is not going to help anyone. Each school must look at the culture and if they have a very collaborative approach to teaching, no need for spending huge amounts on mentoring. If it is every man, woman and child for themselves – then get them some formal mentoring.

Unfortunately with the ARRA spending bubble soon to burst, mentoring will be one of the very first casualties

No difference.

Mathematica Policy Research, Inc has a new study out on teacher certification comparing traditional versus alternatively certification teachers.

The conclusion:

"This study found no benefit, on average, to student achievement from placing an AC teacher in the classroom when the alternative was a TC teacher, but there was no evidence of harm, either. In addition, the experimental and nonexperimental findings together indicate that although individual teachers appear to have an effect on students’ achievement, we could not identify what it is about a teacher that affects student achievement. Variation in student achievement was not strongly linked to the teachers’ chosen preparation route or to other measured teacher characteristics."

Important stuff. More to come on this but this is the third study to come to the same conclusion - there is no benefit to teachers going through traditional routes. Having a route like ABCTE's gives you more potential teachers and does nothing to the quality of teaching in schools.

Mentoring - still searching

For true alternative teacher certification programs, mentoring is a critical component to ensure that career changers are brought up to speed as fast as possible. In an independent study of ABCTE teachers, we were very presently surprised to see that 83% of our first year teachers had a mentor and received about 45 minutes per week with that mentor. So our school districts are helping new teachers.

But how effective is that mentoring? Mathematica Policy Research just came out with a randomized study of the mentoring program that was the gold standard – The New Teacher Center’s program. This program can cost school districts around $5,000 per teacher so with that kind of investment, you want a good pay off.

Some quick thoughts from the study -

1. 17 districts and several hundred teachers were involved. The majority of students in each district were low-income
2. Control group received normal mentoring and the treatment group got either the New Teacher Center or the ETS program
3. Plan is for 7 districts to keep up with the study during a second year of mentoring
   
4. Major finding is that if you give teachers a more intensive mentoring program, they report receiving more mentoring
5. Study did NOT find any impacts on student achievement or teacher observation scores or retention

We all continue to look for the one thing that might help all teachers and students perform at a higher level. It appears that these mentoring programs are not it and that we need to keep looking.

Time on Task

Apologies to the 10’s of loyal readers – summer hiatus to take care of family issues, get daughter 1 ready to transfer to James Madison University and relax.

But, there is no rest for education reformers – so a little recap of the ABCTE summer. We have been extremely busy looking at the data from Mathematica on our program and pretty pleased with the results so far – student achievement data will come in December. We have been taking a ton of enrollments from Missouri (325)– a lot of pent up demand for an affordable program to get into teaching in that state and we have been meeting with decision makers to look at the next set of states for ABCTE.

As for me, I have taken on the role of Board Chair for a small charter school here in DC. The Academia Bilingüe de la Comunidad Public Charter School (ABC), which opened in the Fall of 2005, is a Bilingual English and Spanish total-immersion Public Charter School in Washington DC, serving grades 6-8. We have not made AYP yet and our test scores are pretty dismal.
When asking for advice from other education leaders, I hear one thing pretty clearly – it is time on task. There is no silver bullet special program or teaching technique that will get AYP – it is how much time you spend on math and reading that will get scores up. And when you look at the KIPP model, there is a ton of time on task and they get results. Now they also have great facilities, dedicated parents, energetic teachers willing to put in the time. But if they tried to get the same results in the normal school day/year, I doubt they would.

So I embark on a journey for AYP. It started with getting a great principal who was hired in June. Then the simple task of really cleaning the school to show the great facility and I can assure you that a man never walked so tall as when he stooped to clean a middle school bathroom. We are heavily recruiting students and working on teacher training. I will keep you posted on the results as we try to work on greater time on task.