The federal government gives local districts more than a billion dollars a year for the professional development of teachers. But there’s little accountability for how the money is spent and whether it’s improving teaching and learning. The Hechinger Report is investigating how professional-development funds are spent in the country’s largest school system—New York City—as well as in other districts around the nation to see what we can learn from schools, districts and countries that excel at ongoing teacher training.
Colleges producing too many elementary teachers, data says
Though universities’ economics departments preach the gospel of supply and demand, that principle is not always followed when it comes to their education departments. Data, while imprecise, suggest that some states are producing far more new teachers at the elementary level than will be able to find jobs in their respective states—even as districts struggle to find enough recruits in other certification fields.
Constant teacher training keeps poor Jewish school performing
Tiferes Bnos is an all-girls school located on the first floor of an apartment building near the border of the Williamsburg and Bedford-Stuyvesant sections of Brooklyn. It would be unsurprising if the school had a poor academic track record. None of the teachers went to college. All the students speak Yiddish as their first language. [...]
Can the burgeoning world of online teacher training improve public education?
Online teacher training involves much of the workload that traditional in-the-class instruction does: textbook lessons, classroom observations, student teaching. But the challenges of training successful teachers online were made clear to me during a recent online chat, when the professor in my “Foundations of Education” course slapped on heavy-duty headphones, peered into her computer screen and [...]
How an Australian company won the top spot in teacher training in New York City
A decade ago, Australia nearly topped the charts when it came to teaching children to read, though it lagged behind countries like Canada and Finland. These days, Australia has fallen further in the international ranks. But in New York City, many schools still look to Australians for the secret to academic success—and pay them millions [...]
Q&A with Sana Nasser: How a principal helps teachers improve
Accountability is ratcheting up for schools and teachers, as new teacher-evaluation systems go into effect in more states. But although advocates of the changes say their aim is to help struggling teachers get better, there’s been little attention to which kinds of on-the-job training for teachers work and which don’t. As part of an ongoing [...]
Millions spent on improving teachers, but little done to make sure it’s working
Helping struggling teachers improve has become a big concern–and a big business–across the country, especially as more states, including New York, introduce more rigorous teacher evaluations. The federal government gives local districts more than $1 billion annually for training programs. New York City schools spent close to $100 million last year just on private consultants. [...]
