The Teacher Wars (39 page)

Residents who complete the year successfully can be hired as full-time teachers and earn a regular salary. In Memphis, recruits are required to commit to teach in a high-poverty school for at least three years after their residency year, and if they back out, the consequences are serious: They are on the line to pay $10,000 to MTR for every year they fail to complete. Ninety percent of MTR's recruits are still working as teachers four years later. Nationwide, urban teacher residencies have an 87 percent retention rate at four years, compared to the loss of nearly half of all new urban teachers over a similar period of time, and two-thirds of Teach for America teachers.

In education, teacher retention matters.
An eight-year study of 850,000 New York City fourth and fifth graders found that in schools with high teacher turnover, students lost significant amounts
of learning in both reading and math compared to socioeconomically similar peers at schools with low teacher turnover—even if their own classroom teacher was not new, and even if overall teacher quality at the school remained constant. The negative effects of turnover were even higher in schools with many low-achieving or black students.

These results are common sense. At high-turnover schools, administrators spend more time recruiting, interviewing, and hiring, when they could be focused on improving instruction. When many teachers resign each year, institutional memory is lost, and ties to the community weaken. There are fewer veterans around to show newbies the tricks of the trade.

That is why the urban teacher residency model is so exciting. Teach for America cracked an important code in American education: With its 14 percent acceptance rate, it made teaching in high-poverty schools elite.
When Thomas Kane, Douglas Staiger, and Robert Gordon studied 150,000 Los Angeles elementary school students, they found no large student achievement differences related to how a child's teacher entered the classroom: through a traditional college of education, TFA, or some other alternative route. But the study did find that, across the board, first-year teachers struggled and their students generally earned lower test scores than they had the year before. This is an important consideration for superintendents and principals as programs like Teach for America grow each year, and as veteran teachers are laid off. Some reformers, like Eric Hanushek, believe teacher churn is fine, as long as the new teachers coming in are high quality. But the latest research shows schools simply do not have an unlimited capacity to absorb and train first-year teachers, and that students suffer when they are assigned to a string of novice teachers in grade after grade. Where schools do need to hire newcomers, they'd be better off hiring ones who will stay.

Of course, every teacher must have a first year in the classroom, and there is a real lack of evidence that teachers colleges are especially good at selecting the best potential educators. Many teacher residencies use what's called the “star teacher” criteria to recruit and select nontraditional candidates. This is
a system developed by Martin Haberman, a psychologist who died in 2012. Haberman studied
the characteristics of teachers in high-poverty schools in several cities. His “stars” were those who were rated highly by principals and who stayed in their jobs for many years. It turned out the stars were more likely than unsuccessful teachers to be thirty or older, to have extensive work experience in fields other than education, to be parents, and to have a working-class black, Latino, or white background. Though they demonstrated deep content knowledge, many had graduated from non-elite colleges, and had often begun at community colleges. They had grown up in the city, not the suburbs, and already had experience spending time with low-income children, often as volunteers. Many hailed from church communities or families in which teaching was considered a high-status profession, not a fallback or an unusual choice for a well-educated person. They had already lived, or they wanted to live, long term in the city in which they would teach. And they were coachable—they responded quickly and well to critical feedback from mentors. In short, they were a lot like Marcus Clark, who was accepted into MTR. “God was really changing my heart to work with kids,” he said.

By casting a wide net, urban teacher residencies have recruited an unusually diverse group of teachers. Forty percent are people of color (compared to 17 percent of teachers nationwide), 48 percent have been out of college for three years or more, and 39 percent have the content knowledge to teach the underserved STEM subjects: science, technology, engineering, and math.

The yearlong residency in a mentor's classroom—a requirement in high-achieving places like Finland and Shanghai—allows residency programs to screen out residents who, even with the intense coaching they receive, aren't able to develop into good teachers, typically 15 to 20 percent of residents per year. That level of rigor is attractive to ambitious people who want to be part of a select group of highly qualified professionals (and to principals looking to hire them). And unlike the typical student teaching program run by a college education department, urban teacher residencies have a selective process for identifying mentor teachers, who must show proof that they can raise student achievement, and who undergo training on how to provide other adults with helpful feedback.

Research from Urban Teacher Residency United, a national network
of nineteen programs, shows that principals consistently rate urban teacher residency grads as more effective than other first-year teachers. In Memphis, residency grads produce higher student test score gains in fourth- and eighth-grade math, and they perform similarly to other teachers in reading, science, and social studies. A small, initial evaluation of the Boston Teacher Residency (BTR), one of the more established programs,
found a mixed record on student achievement. In their first few years, Boston Teacher Residency teachers were no different from other teachers in English language arts, and they were less effective in math. But BTR graduates also improved much more rapidly than other teachers, and by year four they were outperforming both novices and veterans from other pathways. On retention, BTR was clearly superior, with 75 percent of teachers remaining through year five, compared to just 50 percent throughout the district. BTR graduates were also much more likely to be people of color (48 percent compared to 32 percent of the other teachers in the district) and were more likely to be qualified to teach math and science.

The fact that BTR graduates seem to struggle in their first year as teachers of record, despite the residency year, is disappointing. Like other research, this seems to suggest that the only way to truly learn how to manage one's own classroom is to actually do the job. Yet the researchers concluded that the big financial investment Boston is making in the teacher residency program is paid back over the course of residents' more stable careers, suggesting that over the long term, increasing the number of BTR teachers in the district could lead to overall student achievement gains.

The growing body of evidence on the importance of teacher retention has even changed the culture within Teach for America. In 2012 New York City's top TFA official, Jeff Li, announced he was stepping down to return to classroom teaching. He launched a campaign inside TFA called Teach Beyond 2, an effort to spread the message about how a longer classroom career could positively impact students. Two years later TFA's new co-CEOs, Elisa Villanueva Beard and Matt Kramer, announced two pilot programs: one to provide preselected college seniors with a full year of teacher training before they enter the classroom and one to provide up to five years of
professional development support for corps alumni who continue to teach. “Teaching beyond two years cannot be a backup plan—it has to be the main plan,” Kramer said in a March 2014 speech.

There is some evidence that today, more TFA corps members than in previous years are staying in the classroom beyond their two-year commitment. (The tough recession job market could be one reason why.) A 2010 independent study found 60 percent of TFA corps members still teaching after three years, a retention rate comparable to national averages in urban schools, though only 36 percent were still teaching after four years, fewer than average. About 85 percent of TFA teachers who stay in the profession, however, leave their initial placements to work at more desirable schools, a level of turnover that the researchers described as “
very problematic” for those schools most struggling with low achievement.

At a July 2013 “listening session” I attended with corps members and alumni in Detroit, the co-CEOs acknowledged that over one-third of principals who work with TFA recruits have asked for a longer commitment. “Are we destabilizing communities?” Villanueva Beard asked. “That is one question we've got to take and really critically examine.” She and Kramer have also promised to be more cautious about sending TFA recruits into regions with low demand for new teachers.

One telling difference between TFA and urban teacher residencies is that TFA has always embraced its outsider status. It uses its own, typically very young alumni to train corps members, and boasts about the achievements of famous TFAers, like Mike Johnston, Michelle Rhee, Dave Levin, and Mike Feinberg, who have challenged the educational establishment by opening nonunionized charter schools and pushing for weaker tenure laws and value-added evaluation of teachers. In that sense, TFA has always been as much a political movement as an organization focused on classroom instruction.
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Urban teacher residencies are agnostic on the issue of traditional versus charter schools—they exist in both—but in
terms of day-to-day practice, they embrace the opportunity to work closely with teachers and unions already entrenched in the public school system.

“
A lot of UTRs are working to really engage their local union in the design and development of these programs,” says Christine Brennan Davis, the curriculum director at Urban Teacher Residency United. “Our model resonates with unions in the sense of the role of the mentor teacher. We value excellent veteran teachers and their role in preparing the next generation.” Union partnerships have been helpful to UTRs politically, too. When the recession hit and teacher hiring freezes and layoffs became a reality, programs worked with unions to identify ways to keep bringing residents into the classroom, but only in the subjects and grade levels where they were truly needed.

At Kingsbury High School in Memphis, where Marcus Clark works, about a third of the school's teachers have participated in the Memphis Teacher Residency, as either residents or mentors. This degree of penetration, sometimes called the “teaching hospital” model, allows best practices tailored to a specific school to be passed from professional to professional. The close contact between veterans and trainees is a two-way street: Veterans may be great at classroom management, but trainee teachers may bring in new ideas from their courses about how to analyze student data. This model changes the typical direction of American school reform, from top down to bottom up. Instead of policy makers imposing a reform structure or pedagogical agenda on teachers, groups of teachers work together to improve a school. Though high-quality teacher residencies are currently producing only five hundred teachers per year, the exponential growth of Teach for America over the last two decades suggests that if philanthropists and policy makers were to recognize the value of this model, they might be able to scale it up relatively quickly—as long as effective classroom teachers were willing to participate as mentors.

Alex Caputo-Pearl also believes that groups of teachers, working together, have the power to transform failing schools. After joining TFA's very first corps, back in 1990, Caputo-Pearl taught for four years in Compton, got married (and hyphenated his last name), then tried law school and urban planning classes. He spent two years organizing a campaign in support of L.A.'s public bus system. But he kept feeling tugged back to the classroom. He liked spending time with kids every day and meeting their parents. Teaching was so much more rooted in the real world than the social justice theory he'd studied in grad school. In 2001 he began teaching history at Crenshaw High School. He and his wife, Lisa, another TFA alum, moved to the surrounding neighborhood of Leimert Park, which is filled with low-slung, colorful bungalows, neatly kept, and ringed by car-clogged boulevards rife with empty storefronts. They were among the few white residents.

The school itself had a long, often proud history. Darryl Strawberry's 1979 Crenshaw Cougars baseball squad is remembered as one of the most talented high school teams ever. Crenshaw is also the school depicted in the 1991 movie
Boyz n the Hood
, the one where the gangs are a little less tough than those in Compton, and the most talented kids hope to escape and attend college. But by the time Caputo-Pearl arrived, the situation at Crenshaw was bleak. Charter schools, some of them in impressive new buildings paid for by private philanthropists, had siphoned off many of the school's working-class and lower-middle-class students, the ones whose parents had been most involved. Ninety-five percent of Crenshaw students were living in poverty, and 12 percent lived in homes where no English was spoken. A quarter lived somewhere without a parent, an unusual number of them in group homes or foster homes run by the state. Test scores were the lowest in the district.