Holding a college major in education is not correlated with effectiveness in elementary and middle school classrooms, regardless of the university at which the major was earned. Teachers do become more effective with a few years of teaching experience, but (except in elementary reading) no gains—and some declines—in effectiveness appear in the second decade after a teacher has begun teaching. These and other results are obtained from estimations using value-added models that control for student characteristics as well as school and (where appropriate teacher) fixed effects that estimate teacher effectiveness in reading and math for Florida students in 4th through 8th grades for six school years, 2001-02 through 2006-07. The findings suggest that teacher selection and compensation policies are in need of revision.

Matthew M. Chingos, Program on Education Policy and Governance Working Papers Series

Large scale recruitment of educated, unemployed youth as teachers in government schools is a favourite electoral sop of most governments before the Assembly elections, something which the National Council for Teacher Education (Amendment) Bill, 2010 is at loggerheads with.

Objections to the Bill–which seeks to standardise teacher training across the country and regulate teacher training institutes—have come in from poll-going states like West Bengal and Uttar Pradesh.

The Bill was introduced in the Budget session and has been referred to the Standing Committee on Human Resource Development. The main provisions of the Bill include the minimum required marks for eligibility in B Ed and for teachers in primary schools across the country.

The West Bengal government had in October last year advertised recruitment of 58,000 teachers in primary schools with just a matriculation as eligibility. This invited objections from the Centre but since the previously existing NCTE Act had been successfully challenged by the Uttar Pradesh government in court, nothing much could be done. The UP government had reduced the eligibility criterion for taking B.Ed entrance exams from 50% in class XII to 45%.

“This amendment to standardise teacher’s education across the country has been brought in to circumvent the Allahabad High Court judgement,” said a source in the HRD ministry. “Basically, to prevent arbitrary lowering of eligibility criterion as and when it is politically convenient,” he added. “West Bengal’s anxiety is understandable since the state is going for polls in 2011,” said the source.

“Now, the West Bengal government has again written to us saying that the Centre was infringing on the right of the state government as education is a concurrent subject,” said a source. “Some Left MPs have also given a representation to the ministry saying that regulation will stifle the growth of teacher training institutes,” said the source.

Nistula Hebba, The Financial Express, May 28, 2010

New Delhi: Two bills were introduced on Friday in the Rajya Sabha to regulate the quality of teachers and amend the Right to Education (RTE) Act to make it mentally-disabled friendly.

The first Bill will seek to clarify the stand of the National Council for Teacher Education (NCTE) Act, 1993, on qualification of school teachers in the teacher education system.

The provisions of the NCTE (Amendment) Bill 2010, once passed, shall apply to institutions and their students and teachers. It will apply to “schools imparting pre-primary, primary, upper primary, secondary or senior secondary education and colleges providing senior secondary or intermediate education irrespective of the fact, by whatever, names they may be called.”

According to the Bill, for maintaining standards of education in schools, the council may, by regulation, determine the qualification of people for being recruited as teachers in any school or college, by whatever name called, established, run, aided or recognized by the central or state government or local or other authority.

Human Resource Development (HRD) Minister Kapil Sibal tabled the Bill in the Rajya Sabha amid opposition protest over Indian Premier League (IPL) row involving Minister of State for External Affairs Shashi Tharoor.

According to the Bill, “It is considered necessary to amend the Act to clarify that it applies to schools, school teachers, and the minimum qualifications for appointment of school teachers, so as to have uniform standards of teaching in schools in the country.”

The second Bill, called the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education (Amendment) Bill, 2010, seeks to provide free and compulsory education to all students, including those who suffer from autism, cerebral palsy, mental retardation etc.

It was also introduced in the Rajya Sabha.

India Edunews.net, 17 April 2010

The latest effort to reform teacher education strikes me as a tale of good intentions gone badly wrong. We repeat in miniature the approach the school reformers take on a larger canvas. Like them, we have, with the best of intentions, seized on ideas that show great promise, carried them beyond reasonable limits, and ignored the complexity of the issues with which we are engaged.

Here is the alluring if oversimplified logic behind the latest approach to the reform of teacher education: The purpose of undergraduate and graduate programs for teachers is to prepare them to successfully educate young people in K-12 classrooms. Since we already measure the achievement of K-12 students through a variety of standardized tests, it seems sensible to evaluate the quality of a teacher education program by the criterion of how well the students of its graduates, all other things being equal, do on these standard measures of academic achievement. The teacher education programs that have the most positive impact on teacher effectiveness will then serve as models to be emulated by others.

Until recently, the task of making connections between the academic achievement of K-12 students and the preparation of their teachers has been too tangled a project to tackle. Outcomes-based teacher-educators and state education department officials settled for determining a number of teacher behaviors that seemed to enhance student learning. They then required teacher-candidates to demonstrate competency in these in order to acquire certification. Demonstrating such competencies seemed superior as a predictor of teacher effectiveness to completing a set of courses or a degree.

“We have taken promising ideas, oversimplified them, and proclaimed that we are on the road to better teacher education programs.”

Given the new sense of urgency about narrowing achievement gaps, and supported by new technologies and more statistical sophistication, state education departments, the U.S. Department of Education, and various universities will soon be tracking the connection between teacher education programs and the test scores of K-12 students. One teacher education institution has already placed a full-page ad on the inside cover of a leading research journal claiming that the students of graduates of its reading and literacy program “had gains in reading fluency that were on average 4.8 words per minute, or 14 percent greater than students” of teachers who had received master’s degrees from other programs.

In a major speech on teacher preparation, given at Teachers College, Columbia University, this past October, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan urged teacher-educators to “make better outcomes for students the overarching mission that propels all their efforts.” He called on states and districts to put in place longitudinal-data systems allowing them to track student performance and growth on subject-matter tests to the teacher education programs that prepared the students’ teachers.

When Secretary Duncan tells his audience that “to keep America competitive, and to make the American dream of equal educational opportunity a reality, we need to recruit, reward, train, learn from, and honor a new generation of talented teachers,” he reminds us of the ways in which American teachers, and teacher-educators, have always seen their work as a missionary endeavor. He is Catharine Beecher encouraging her teachers to found schools in the newly opened Western territories; he is W.E.B. Du Bois praising the women of New England who taught the children of the freedmen during Reconstruction; he is Jane Addams, inspiring the social workers in America’s cities to respond to the wave of European immigrants in the early part of the last century.

Again today, the schools, overreaching themselves, claim primary responsibility for the nation’s achieving equality of opportunity at home and economic competitiveness on the world stage. And we teacher-educators see ourselves as responsible for the success of the schools in their dual mission. Further, we now assert the ability to trace the link between the educational achievement of students and the quality of the teacher education institutions in which their teachers were trained.

Holding teacher education programs responsible for the quality of the teachers they graduate seems reasonable. Measuring the quality of teachers primarily by the educational achievement of their students is appealing. If we have the statistical sophistication to trace student scores on achievement tests to the programs preparing our teachers, why not do so? Won’t such transparency set off a healthy competition to turn out teachers able to enhance the measured educational achievement of their charges?

When teacher-educators enlist in this latest educational crusade, their intentions are noble, but they are blind to the complexity of the task. It lies not just in the difficulty of teasing out teacher effects on measured student achievement, or in connecting current teacher practice to past teacher education programs. The more serious problem concerns our definition of student achievement. At some level we and Secretary Duncan both know that the tests do not quite capture it.

In another place in his Teachers College speech, Duncan says: “A great teacher can literally change the course of a student’s life. They light a lifelong curiosity, a desire to participate in democracy, and instill a thirst for knowledge.” He ends his talk with Henry Adams’ encomium to teachers: “A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.” These are more than empty phrases designed to please an audience. They reveal Duncan’s understanding that the real work of teachers involves more than producing in their charges adequate scores on standardized tests.

To make real our good intentions, we leap at oversimplifications. We unwisely accept test scores as a facsimile of student learning. In doing so, we talk ourselves into believing we are holding our schools, and now our teacher education institutions, accountable. Accountability of institutions is necessary in a democratic society. We have good intentions—but we act with willful blindness. For we surely know, with John Dewey, and with Arne Duncan in his better moments, that student learning, achievement, and intelligence involve, among a host of other things, the growing capacity to make meaning out of new experiences, a capacity that the testers, to their credit, make no claim to measure. We know that test scores do not get at the curiosity, the thirst for knowledge, and the commitment to democracy of which Duncan speaks, but, recklessly, we act as if they do.

Tests quite often have significant value, and a rich variety of pedagogical uses. Finally, though, students’ test scores represent their performance on a single occasion, on a small sample of test items, most likely in a paper-and-pencil format, relating to an equally small sample of learning objectives in the content area tested. We go beyond all reasonable limits when we take the test scores as a proxy of student achievement or as a measure of the quality of the programs from which teachers graduated. We have been bewitched by the real promise of quantifying certain abilities, by our understandable desire to hold our institutions accountable, and by the significance we attach to our calling. We have taken promising ideas, oversimplified them, and proclaimed that we are on the road to better teacher education programs, better schools, more educational opportunity, making America competitive, and to pie in the sky by and by.

William A. Proefriedt, Education week, 6 April 2010

As the Right to Education Act comes into force from April 1, Jharkhand faces the elementary question of how to implement the Act in the state. There are in total 40,313 schools in Jharkhand, imparting education to around 40 lakh students up to Class VIII. Almost all these government-run schools are facing a shortage of teaching staff.

Of the 1,33,500 posts for teachers in the state, 13,500 posts are lying vacant as of now. An estimated 15 per cent of the current teaching staff is set to retire soon. In fact, about 10 per cent of them would retire by the end of this year.

The salaries of the teachers, too, pose a serious problem. While the permanent teaching staff get a salary between Rs 12,000 to Rs 18,000, those appointed on contract as ‘para teachers’ receive paltry amounts between Rs 4,000 and Rs 5,000 per month.

This difference in the salaries has left the ‘para teachers’ disgruntled and on a perpetual mode of agitation. “The permanent teachers are entitled to pension and gratuity. Why have these benefits been denied to us,” asked a para teacher who led a demonstration of hundreds of such teachers outside the Assembly, demanding regularisation of their services, on March 26.

Instead of first filling up the posts of teachers lying vacant, the state is trying to enroll as many students as possible, revealed another para teacher. “This is being done after Parliament and the President of India cleared the Right to Education Act on August 26 last year,” the teacher said.

As per the RTE Act, the student-teacher ratio in all schools run under the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan launched by the Centre in 2002 has to be 1:30. At the Utkramit Vidalaya in Lohardaga, this ratio is 1:450.

Similarly, at Jirhul Utkramit School in Bharna block in Gumla district, there are 360 students and one teacher. However, at the Utkramit School in Ranchi, there are 270 students and 30 teachers.

Asked about this, D K Saxena, Director (Primary Education), attributed it to the large number of vacancies and teachers’ preference to get transferred to towns in the absence of civic amenities in rural areas . “Now we are trying to rationalise the pattern of staff,” he added.

The recruitment of teachers is to be made by the State Public Service Commission. But since the chairman of the commission, Dilip Prasad, is facing charges of nepotism and corruption, the state government has not assigned SPSC the task to advertise recruitment to the posts. “We are trying to find an alternative mechanism to recruit qualified teachers,” said Mridula Sinha, Secretary, (Human Resource Department), under whose jurisdiction the neighbourhood schools of the state government work.

Nearly, 60 per cent of government schools in the state don’t have libraries and toilets. Also, the teachers, who, as per the RTE, are to promote students on the basis of their assessment rather than the marks scored in examinations, are not trained to do so.

Asked how this problem can be addressed, Sinha said, “We have set up centres to train teachers take up this new responsibility.”

Manoj Prasad, Indian Express, 12 April 2010

A new national curriculum framework for teacher education was today released, putting more focus on field experience and re-orienting teachers to enable children to learn through activities.

Putting behind the rote teaching method, the new framework, developed by National Council for Teacher Education (NCTE), gives importance on inclusive education, perspective for equitable and sustainable development, gender perspectives and ICT in schooling and e-learning.

The framework was released by Human Resource Development Minister Kapil Sibal here.

“The framework aims at training the teachers in such a manner that they will allow the child discover the world and learn through activity,” he said.

This framework is an outcome of an exercise undertaken by NCTE towards improving the quality of teacher education. It has been prepared keeping in view the National Curriculum Framework, 2005 and the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009, he said.

Press Trust of India, 19 March 2010