Tag: Teaching Residencies

GLOBAL
International Task Force on Teachers for Education 2030. TEACHER TASK FORCE SUPPORTS CALL TO #COMMITTOEDUCATION   This worrying trend is coupled with the data showing that the proportion of trained teachers has also been falling. In sub-Saharan Africa, only 50% of teachers meet the minimum required training at secondary level, and 64% in primary, because since 2000, the focus has been on solving the teacher shortage and schools have been hiring contract teachers without qualifications to close the quantitative gaps at lower cost.

OECD Directorate for Education and Skills. How Teachers Learn. The publication… summarises the TALIS 2018 findings on teachers’ initial and professional development…

SwissInfo. Wanted: 10,000 teachers a year for Swiss schools  According to SRF, 5,000 trainee teachers graduate each year, leaving a yearly teacher shortfall of 5,000. Of these, around a fifth – 1,000 – will have dropped out of teaching within five years…

UNESCO Global Education Monitoring [GEM] Report. Education as healing: Addressing the trauma of displacement through social and emotional learning   A new policy paper …calls for better training for teachers to provide psychosocial support to migrant and refugee children who have lived through traumatic events.

University of KwaZulu-Natal. UKZN’s youngest dean makes P-Rating history  The rating, also known as the president’s award, is given to young researchers (under the age of 35) for exceptional potential, demonstrated in their published work and research outputs…Msibi, who became the youngest dean in SA when he was appointed dean and head of the School of Education at UKZN at the age of 34… He holds a master’s degree in Education from the Teachers College at Columbia University in the United States…

 

UNITED STATES
AACTE.
1) JTE Earns High Ranking, Rise in Impact Factor   In the recently released 2019 Journal Citation Reports, AACTE’s Journal of Teacher Education (JTE) achieved a 2-year impact factor score of 3.263… The impact factor increased from JTE’s last score of 3.180…
2) State of the State Webinar  For the first time since 1914, all but one state legislature in the U.S. is dominated by a single party. The result has been a pattern of conservative leaning legislation in Republican-held states and liberal legislation in states controlled by Democrats. This is a political dynamic that will have far-reaching consequences for education policymaking well into the future. 

Center for American Progress. Student Debt: An Overlooked Barrier to Increasing Teacher Diversity   For individuals who have taught, 88 percent of Black students and 76 percent of Latinx students took out federal student loans to pay for college, compared with 73 percent of white students. As the data show, Latinx students were less likely to borrow federal student loan money than Black students, but they were more likely to borrow compared with white students. 

EdSource. Teacher hopefuls offered $10,000 to enter California State University residency program   California State University is accepting applications from students enrolled in teacher preparation programs who want to spend a year in a residency program and receive a $10,000 scholarship in exchange for promising to teach in a high-needs school for two years

Education Week.
1) 14 Questions Educators Should Ask About AI-Based Products   As for fears that AI will eliminate teaching positions, Oranje is optimistic that it will not. His hope is that AI will “actually expand teaching,” he said, and that there will be a need for more educators, rather than fewer.
2) Schools still struggling with how to teach about slavery  “It’s never OK to recreate painful oppressive events, even in the name of education,” said Mara Sapon-Shevin, a professor of inclusive education at Syracuse University, who said teachers risk harming their students’ sense of belonging, safety and inclusion. “One would never simulate an Indian massacre or having Jews march into the ovens.” Nor should teachers “gamify” painful history, Teaching Tolerance Director Maureen Costello said, citing exercises like having students compete to remove seeds from cotton.
3) Teach For America’s Defenders and Detractors Are Both Wrong [commentary by TC Prof. J. Henig]  The story was about the evolution of Teach For America away from its founding mission “to tap idealistic graduates of elite universities to teach at traditional public schools in high-poverty areas” into “an informal but vital ally of the charter school movement.”
4) The Deficit Lens of the ‘Achievement Gap’ Needs to Be Flipped. Here’s How  We should be very cautious of measures and practices that can influence educators to perceive students, or groups of students, as deficient, unless we accompany those measures and practices with the training educators would need to implement them effectively and equitably.

Florida Trend. Peace Corps and the University of South Florida Announce New Paul D. Coverdell Fellows Program  The Paul D. Coverdell Fellows Program began in 1985 at Teachers College, Columbia University and now includes more than 100 university partners across the country, from the District of Columbia to Hawaii. The program is reserved for students who have successfully completed Peace Corps service abroad.

Forbes. Beto O’Rourke: Let’s Forgive All Student Loan Debt For Teachers   O’Rourke’s proposal differs from the current Teach Loan Forgiveness Program in several ways. First, it would have no limit on the amount of student loan forgiveness, which compares to a maximum of $17,500 under the current program. Second, it would apply to all public school teachers, not only those who work in low-income school or educational service agencies. Third, it may not have a five-year teaching requirement.

Heavy. Jeffrey Epstein Net Worth: 5 Fast Facts You Need to Know   Jeffrey Epstein started his career as a mathematician and teacher, attending the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences before leaving without a degree to teach calculus and physics at the Dalton School.

Hechinger Report. Teaching global warming in a charged political climate   The science behind climate change is complicated and evolving, and most teachers aren’t prepared to teach it well. Many textbooks don’t touch the topic, according to science educators… A state agency [OK] funded by the oil and gas industry pumps money into teacher training and classroom materials, including books featuring a cartoon character called Petro Pete, with the goal of promoting fossil fuels. 

NEAToday. Report: Experienced Teachers Key to Students Beating the Odds   And California isn’t alone. An Arizona Republic investigation found that emergency teaching certifications in that state have increased 400 percent. Meanwhile, as Oklahoma schools opened this fall, state officials approved their 2,153^rd emergency teaching certificate—up from 32 seven years ago.

NPR.  Broken Promises: Teachers Sue U.S. Over Student Loans That Weren’t Forgiven

Washington Post.
1) Financier in sex abuse case went from math whiz to titan. He taught calculus and physics at the prestigious Dalton School, a prep school in Manhattan, from 1973 to 1975, despite not having a college degree. Attorney General William Barr’s father, Donald Barr, was headmaster at the time.
2) How student debt hinders teacher diversity   Authors of the study point to the Boston Teacher Residency as a model to replicate. The state program has a goal of ensuring that people of color constitute at least half of each graduating class. Graduates earn a teacher’s license and a master’s degree in education from the University of Massachusetts at Boston in a year. They receive a stipend, health benefits and a free education if they teach in Boston’s public schools for three years.

 

NEW YORK STATE
NYSATE. Newsletter Vol. 1 No. 2

• Preview of the Annual 2019 NYSATE/NYACTE Fall Conference
• Nominations for NYSATE & NYACTE AWARDS
• Residency Mentoring Workshop in NYC August 5-6

USA Today. Here’s where it’s best (and worst) to be a teacher   With a cost of living adjusted average teacher pay of $72,643 a year, New York public school teachers are paid better than teachers in every state except for Massachusetts. 

 

NEW YORK CITY
Chalkbeat. NYC and union officials hail move toward pay parity for pre-K teachers but some worry over educators left out of deal   Under the agreement, certified teachers with masters and bachelors degrees would see their pay increase every October through 2021. By that date, certified teachers with a master’s degree would make at least $69,000, and certified teachers with a bachelor’s degree would earn about $61,000 — a jump of almost $21,000 and more than $17,000, respectively. 

Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts.  Important Announcement from Superintendent Vivian Orlen  Ms. Yeou-Jey Vasconcelos has been appointed Interim Acting Principal for LaGuardia. Ms. Vasconcelos comes to you from Talent Unlimited High School on the East Side, where she served as principal for four years… She is passionate about the arts, holding a … Master’s in Music and Music Education from [Teachers College] Columbia University.

Teachers College.
1) Graduate Gallery 2019: Mercedes Lysaker (M.A., Music & Music Education) teaches music with strings attached   While at Teachers College, Lysaker discovered in herself a desire to “be a serious string pedagogue” – to invent “a pedagogy that really embraces everything a child is and brings into the lesson,” she said. “I think it’s my responsibility to teach everybody, exactly as they are.”
2) Teaching Residents @ Teachers College. July 2019 | Summer Edition Newsletter

GLOBAL
Center for Global Development. 30 New Findings in Global Education: RISE Conference 2019

• In rural Ghana, personal and professional challenges in the lives of new teachers are associated with lower learning and reduced socioemotional development among their students
• In middle schools in Pakistan, in-class technology together with teacher training (to help them integrate the technology effectively) increased both effort and test scores among students

Education HQ Australia. Practical experience is crucial for improving teachers’ confidence in their classroom and student management   The changing landscape of Australian society, thus classrooms, means that it might be time to review the training provided to pre-service and in-service teachers and to ensure they are prepared with what they need to know and do to meet the increasingly diverse challenges they encounter.

Education International. “The Fast Track for Newly Arrived Teachers in Sweden: the union’s perspective”   The Swedish government took the initiative of creating the so called “fast-track” into the teaching career since a relatively large group of immigrants had a background in teaching.

Forbes. Number Of Teachers Quitting The Classroom After Just One Year Hits All-Time High   Almost one in six teachers (15.3%) who qualified in 2017 left the state school sector in England within a year, according to data published by the Department for Education today…Teaching training courses have also repeatedly failed to hit their targets, with particular shortages in STEM subjects.

 

UNITED STATES
Associated Press. Official: Oklahoma emergency teacher licenses up 54% in 2018-19   State-issued nonaccredited teaching certificates allow people without a state teaching license to teach in a classroom for two years while they complete training. The vast majority of nonaccredited teachers have degrees and work experience in other professions. 

Association of Teacher Educators. 2020 Annual Meeting.  Atlantic City, NJ Feb.15-20  Call for Proposals extended to July 15

Chronicle of Higher Education. Demand for Campus Child Care Is Growing. Choosing How to Provide It Can Be Fraught.   In California, a teacher at a for-profit center is required to have only half the early-childhood-education credits required of full teachers at nonprofit centers, and assistant teachers at for-profit centers aren’t required to have any.

Education Week. Forty Percent of Elementary School Teachers’ Work Could Be Automated By 2030, McKinsey Global Institute Predicts   It’s also important that today’s educators understand how the ways in which work is gendered could affect the futures their female students face. Women may be particularly well served by receiving the training to participate in flexible and remote work arrangements that involve telecommuting, the report suggests.

Richmond Times-Dispatch. Virginia launches teaching degrees at colleges in effort to curtail teacher shortage   The state is launching 53 new teacher preparation programs and 25 new degrees, by Gov. Ralph Northam announced last week, that will let people become teachers after getting an education degree in four years.

Stanford Center for Assessment, Learning and Equity (SCALE). edTPA Team Transition News  Dr. Andrea Whittaker has decided to step away from her role as the National Director of edTPA…

UChicago Consortium on School Research. Arts Education And Social-Emotional Learning Outcomes Among K–12 Students: Developing A Theory Of Action   This does not mean that being intentional about leveraging social-emotional components is easy. To the contrary, doing intentional social-emotional work can be quite difficult at times and is not necessarily a skill that is taught in teacher-training programs.

University of North Carolina-Charlotte. Cato College of Education: UNCC Diversity Recruitment Video

Washington Post. Borrowing for college just got a little cheaper

 

NEW YORK STATE
New York Association of Colleges for Teacher Education. Excelsior: Leadership in Teaching and Learning— first fully online, open-access issue

NYSATE/NYACTE Annual Fall Conference. October 17-19 Gideon Putnam Resort, Saratoga Springs

NYS Legislature; Education Bills Passed.
1) Master’s-in-Education Teacher Incentive Scholarship. This bill opens New York’s Master’s-in-Education Teacher Incentive Scholarship program to students who pursue graduate education degrees at private, not-for-profit colleges and universities.
2)  Graduate GPA Bill. After several years of advocacy, a bill to end the requirement that students pursuing graduate degrees in education fields have a minimum 3.0 undergraduate GPA finally passed both Chambers

NYS Register.  Open Public Comment Period. Professional Development Plans and Other Related Requirements for School Districts and BOCES   (4) A teacher acting as a mentor to a new teacher in the classroom teaching service as part of a school district’s or BOCES’ mentoring program pursuant to section 100.2(dd) of this Title may, at the discretion of the school district or BOCES, credit up to 30 hours of such time toward his/her CTLE requirement in each five-year registration period. (5) a teacher acting as a mentor to a teacher candidate pursuant to section 52.21 of this Title may, at the discretion of the school district or BOCES, credit up to 25 hours of such time toward his/her CTLE requirement in each five-year registration period.   Data, views or arguments may be submitted by August 10 to: Petra Maxwell, NYS Education Department, 89 Washington Avenue, Office of Higher Education, Albany, NY 12234, (518) 486-3633, email: [email protected]

 

NEW YORK CITY
Bank Street College Prepared to Teach. Residency Mentoring Workshop August 5-6

Chalkbeat. What NYC’s departing instructional guru learned overseeing the nation’s largest school system Weinberg [TC MA, English Ed] oversaw curriculum, teacher development, college preparation efforts, and managed some of Mayor Bill de Blasio’s biggest priorities, including making computer-science classes available to all students by 2025.

Teachers College.
1) Class Action: The case for empowering our teachers.In a three part series, TC community members ponder teaching’s challenges, reflect on how TC equips teachers to thrive, and offer ideas for restoring the stature teaching deserves.
2) Student and Alumni Profiles
Kimberely Durall (M.A. ’15)   “I majored in education to keep learning while inspiring kids with a background like mine. I didn’t want the limits the world places on students to follow them into my classroom.”

Billy Fong (M.A. ’11)   Fong, who received the 2018 Empire State Excellence in Teaching Award, credits Central Park East II’s leadership for supporting him, and TC mentors such as Celia Oyler for encouraging him to think creatively. 

Raven Hebert (MA ’06) “Teaching was what Hebert wanted to do, and variety was why. At TC, inspired by science education faculty member Jessica Riccio, she embraced her “inner happy nerd” and learned to gear instruction to different students’ needs.”

Lisa McDonald (Ph.D. Candidate)  “My being a teacher stems from this brown little girl who wanted someone to take the time to know me,” says McDonald, a TC Science Education doctoral student… McDonald next encountered a teacher of color at TC, where Professor of Science & Education Felicia Mensah has acquainted her with critical race theory — racism viewed as part of America’s systemic fabric. 

Rebeca Madrigal (M.A. ’98)   “I had to create a channel for my student — his experiences in Mexico,” she recalls. “It was Fidel’s first sign he had knowledge. And it opened my eyes to what being a teacher means.”

Emily Moxey (M.Ed. ’06) As a teenager, Moxey cared for a neighboring family’s two-year-old child who was deaf. In TC’s deaf education program, she learned to “fit the instruction to the child, not vice versa.”

Kevin Paiz-Ramirez (M.A. ’13)  Paiz-Ramirez immediately thought of his TC mentor, hip-hop science educator Christopher Emdin, who advocates knowing what kids face each day, whether it’s dodging gangs en route to school or dealing with gender discrimination.

Larrolyn Patterson Parms-Ford (M.A. ’19, Music & Music Education) Brings Her Voice to the Classroom    We expect black women to be musical artists. But where are the black female music teachers?”…She’s proud of the conversations that ensued, one of which concluded with a black female student expressing her desire to one day become a music teacher as well.

Eric Williamson (M.A. ’19) Williamson learned that empowering young people to create music they find relevant inspires their broader musical curiosity. At the Teachers College Community School in West Harlem, his students performed hip hop and rap as well as classical music and standards. 

GLOBAL
Education Week  Three Big Questions on Artificial Intelligence and Schools   Innova Schools in Lima, Peru are using IBM’s Watson to scan resumes for teacher hiring, he said. “They discovered that credentials on a resume can’t tell them how well a teacher will do in their environment,” he said. But they’ve trained Watson to spot those qualities.

New York Times.  [YAKAWLANG, Afghanistan]  A School With No Heat or Computers but Many College-Bound Students. Mostly Girls.   The fourth-grade math teacher, Ms. Joya, who is 28, did not begin school herself until the Taliban fell when she was 11; she could not read or write, and her only schooling had been sewing class. 

Quartz. Japan is trying really hard to persuade women to start having babies again   The government has said it needs to create 320,000 new public day care slots by 2021, which will mean hiring and training 77,000 more teachers. Filling these slots with highly-educated early childhood caregivers won’t be easy.

 

UNITED STATES
CBS News. Two-thirds of American employees regret their college degrees   At least one sector of employment bucked the trend: Teachers and other professionals in education, which isn’t typically a high-paying profession, were the second-least likely, after engineering grads, to have any regrets tied to their major, with 37% saying they had no regrets.

Chronicle of Higher Education.  What You Told Us About the Challenges of Training Grad Students to Teach   Training, he wrote, improves performance. But becoming a good teacher also requires “educational and professional formation” that improves the mind. Those two ideas, he said, might be combined into teacher preparation.

Clarion Ledger. Over 240 Jackson Public School District teachers’ licenses affected by policy  MDE allows non-certified teachers to apply for a temporary one-year license with renewal contingent upon meeting certain requirements. To renew the license for a second year, license holders have to show proof of enrollment in an alternate route program or that they’ve passed a content test called the Praxis.

Education Week.
1) A District Knew It Was Failing Some Students. How It’s Using Parents to Help   It also collaborated with the teacher’s union to include language in its most recent contract that will give some protections against layoffs for teachers who are graduates of the district’s local teacher-recruitment program, who tend to be from more diverse backgrounds.
2) Young Teachers May Be ‘Digital Natives’ But Need Support in Using Tech, Studies Find   One study, by Kristin Weber, a professor at Edinboro University in northwestern Pennsylvania, found that students set to teach elementary school were less confident that they knew how to use tech in the classroom when they finished their student teaching than before they began. 

Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy [David Steiner, Dir.]. Providence Public School District: A Review   ·Inadequate preparation and support for teaching and learning. Members were very clear that “individual teachers are heroic,” but that many are “cynical and worn down.” They acknowledged that the social context of Providence has changed, and that teachers are not prepared.

KQED. How Preschool Teachers Leverage Student Curiosity into Early STEM Exploration   At Educare New Orleans preschool teachers have been trained to teach STEM ideas through play. 

New York Times. Year-End Roundup, 2018-19: All Our Lesson Plans, All in One Place

Romper.  The Best Time To Teach Baby A Second Language Is Earlier Than You Think  When it comes to the best time to teach your baby a second language, Erika Levy, Ph.D., CCC-SLP, Associate Professor of Communication Sciences and Disorders at Teachers College, Columbia University says, “The earlier the better! Even within the first 6 months of life, babies become keenly aware of the speech sounds in the languages that surround them.”

The74. The Mentor: One Year, Two Teachers and a Quest in the Bronx to Empower Educators and Students to Think for Themselves  Mentoring can’t fix everything, and it’s only one part of a comprehensive induction program to support new teachers, researchers argue. But as teacher walkouts across the country this past year show, teachers are feeling drained and demanding support.

 

NEW YORK STATE
NYSED Office of Higher Education.  June Newsletter
1) New York State teacher certification examinations (NYSTCE) safety nets expiring. Critical information for your candidates
2) Request for proposals for a speech-language and bilingual speech-language personnel development center

  

NEW YORK CITY
Chalkbeat. Stringer calls for paid teacher residencies — the latest piece of a burgeoning education platform as he eyes a run for mayor  On Monday, Comptroller Scott Stringer released a proposal that he hopes will significantly reduce that rate by funding year-long residencies, arguing that training teachers more like doctors could help save the city money, attract a more diverse teaching force, and fill shortages in hard-to-staff subjects and schools.  

New York City Comptroller. Teacher Residencies: Supporting the Next Generation of Teachers and Students. Another successful collaboration between the City and higher education can be seen at Columbia University’s Teachers College. Teaching Residents at Teachers College (TR@TC) is a robust teaching residency that prepares participants through a year-long, paid residency. As of 2017, the program reported retention rates of 94 percent among program graduates.

New York Post.
1) City teachers fleeing New York at an alarming rate: report   To better train teachers, Stringer is calling on the Education Department to adopt a “residency” program that would offer aspiring instructors a $30,000 stipend to work in a city school during their final year of graduate school.
2) Education nonprofit moves into historical Cunard Building   This is just what the city doctor ordered: More space for training teachers. The Relay Graduate School of Education is opening downtown this week in larger space at the historical Cunard Building at 25 Broadway.

New York Times. The Late Bloomer: Learning About the Birds and Bees in College: My Orthodox Jewish education skipped sex ed, and I didn’t have “The Talk” until I was 24.   The person who was supposed to be teaching us 10th grade science was untrained as an educator, teaching until he found a full-time job as a computer programmer.

Teachers College. Class Action: The case for empowering our teachers   In the following three-part special report, you’ll meet Teachers College alumni nationwide who are applying their creativity, resilience and TC preparation toward engaging students as citizens in the making. You’ll also meet TC faculty and alumni in school leadership positions with ideas for restoring a noble profession to the standing it deserves.

GLOBAL
Association Montessori Internationale (AMI).  Training of Trainers Programme 2019 [multiple venues and formats]

Pursuit/Univ. of Melbourne. What Does A Great Teacher Look Like?: Teachers with a strong belief in their own ability to ‘get the job done’ have the biggest impact on a student’s learning   Our previous research (which was launched by former Federal education minister Simon Birmingham last year) found that this practice of teaching should be considered separately from teacher quality, or the personal traits of teachers that contribute to effective teaching. These traits also have an independent impact on student, teacher and school outcomes.

The Centre for Education and International Development (CEID). Colloquium on Teacher Education in sub- Saharan Africa [25 June, Univ. of London]

Univ. of Chicago/Delhi. Reimagining Teacher Training in India Conference Report

UNITED STATES
American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education (AACTE). May Federal Update Webinar Recording

Association of Teacher Educators (ATE). Summer Induction Symposium For New Education Professors [July 27, Burlington, VT]

Central Michigan University. Teacher ed grows in many ways: Program adds students, expands support for current and future educators

Daily Herald. Career Pathways program helped Elk Grove senior thrive   Samantha Pelaez, a Harper College Promise Scholar, is excited for her future as a teacher, a career which she explored while taking part in District 214’s Career Pathways program.

EdWeek.
1) A Gap in Teacher Training: Working With Students Who Have Concussions   A growing number of children have experienced a brain injury—yet most teachers have never learned in preparation or professional development how to work with them.
2) Stop Trying to Standardize Your Students’ Language [commentary]  As educators, we’re especially attuned to the labeling and categorization of language. With honest intentions, we take up what we’re taught in our teacher preparation: that language can be standardized.
3) Want Teachers to Motivate Their Students? Teach Them How to Do It   A study released in May by the Mindset Scholars Network, a collaborative of researchers who study student motivation, found most teacher education programs nationwide do not include explicit training for teachers on the science of how to motivate students.

Honolulu Civil Beat. Students Thrived At This Maui School In Territorial Hawaii   A widely known “best practice” was the Columbia University Teachers College mission of “cultural understanding as an essential element of teaching and learning” in New York City — where Lower East Side immigrants spoke German, Italian and Yiddish.

Learning Policy Institute. EdPrepLab Will Help Educators Develop the Knowledge, Skills, and Dispositions to Support All Students in Learning Deeply   Learning Policy Institute and Bank Street Graduate School of Education announced the launch of Educator Preparation Laboratory (EdPrepLab), an initiative to help educator preparation programs ensure that new teachers and leaders are able to provide k-12 students with education that helps them develop skills like critical thinking, collaboration, communication, and being able to apply knowledge in a range of contexts.

NYTimes.
1) Inside the Elementary School Where Drug Addiction Sets the Curriculum
2) What Will Teacher Raises Buy Students? [OpEd by M. Kraft, Brown Univ.] Data collected by the ACT organization show that high school students most commonly cited low pay as a reason for not being interested in teaching… The second most commonly cited reason high school students gave for not being interested in becoming teachers is the job’s lack of career development opportunities.

The Week. America’s teacher shortage  Studies have found both that under-prepared teachers are more likely to leave the profession and that some alternative pathways into teaching can produce less effective educators, as compared to traditional teaching education programs.

Tulsa World. After years of debilitating teacher shortages, some districts are seeing progress in hiring, retention  A recent career fair attracted more than 180 prospective teachers. Most were hired by the district, Kerns said. She’s confident Broken Arrow will start the school year with all positions filled in every area except special education, which continues to be an area of need across the state.

UDDaily.  Training Delaware’s Teachers  …94% of undergraduates majoring in elementary teacher education (ETE) at the University of Delaware are employed as elementary, middle school or special education teachers after graduation. In addition to traditional classroom learning, ETE majors spend much of their degree program engaged in extensive field experiences in real-world educational settings—teaching, tutoring and mentoring in local schools and community centers.

 

NEW YORK STATE
Brooklyn Daily Eagle. Hiring teachers of color is an investment in student success, group says   Educators for Excellence has since asked the State Education Department to double the funding for My Brother’s Keeper Teacher Opportunity Corps — a state grant program that partners with teacher preparation programs to recruit, train and support new teachers of color entering the profession – to $7 million.

NYSED.
1) Public comment period is open on proposed regulatory changes that would require teacher preparation programs in certain subject areas to dedicate at least 3 semester hours to language acquisition & literacy development of English language learners.Please email comments to [email protected]by June 21.
2) State Education Department Announces Second Class of My Brother’s Keeper Fellows   Also since 2016, NYSED … awarded grants to 16 colleges and universities to help them bolster the retention of highly qualified individuals who value equity and reflect the diversity inside and outside of our classrooms, particularly in high-need schools with recurrent teacher shortages. 

 

NEW YORK CITY
Brooklyn Reporter. Campaign for Children holds City Hall rally for pre-K funding parity   Council Speaker Corey Johnson admitted during the rally, which was organized by Campaign for Children, that a DOE teacher with a Master’s degree who’s been in the system for eight years earns about $85,000 a year, while teachers with the same qualifications teaching at a CBO earn around $49,000 annually.

NYDailyNews. Manhattan memorial to recall forward-thinking Harlem-born educator Irving Hamer Jr.   Raised in central Harlem, the native New Yorker held a number of influential public education positions including deputy commissioner of the state Education Department and Manhattan representative to the city Board of Education… In the classroom, Hamer was a professor of education at Columbia University’s Teachers College, Florida International University Center for Urban Education and Innovation and the University of Memphis.

NYTimes. Velvel Pasternak, Preserver of Hasidic Music, Is Dead at 85   He studied at Juilliard and received a master’s degree in music education from Teachers College at Columbia University…Mr. Pasternak took a sabbatical from teaching at local day schools and flew with his family to Israel, where he visited Hasidic enclaves… 

Teachers College.
1) Confessions of an Active Learner: Amity Buxton (Ed.D.’62, M.A.’52) has supported teachers as learners   Buxton was hired to train student teachers in the combined district through a state-funded program administered by San Francisco State University. With racial tensions running high (including classroom takeovers by the Black Panthers), the challenges of equitably teaching and measuring student outcomes might have proven insurmountable had not Buxton stressed assessing each child’s work on an individual basis and encouraged teachers to act as designers of curriculum and agents of individualized instruction.
2) Teaching Residents at Teachers College. TR@TC June Newsletter

GLOBAL
Calgary Herald. New Education Act would open high schools to mature students as old as 21   Bieber said newly graduated or student teachers can be as young as 22. And Grade 10 students often date Grade 12 students, “but what happens when those Grade 12s are now 21? Things get really muddy, really fast.”

New York Times. Brexit Is Sending Students Packing, Straining Private Schools on Both Ends   …the Council of British International Schools, which plans to start training teachers in cities like Brussels… International teachers are usually hired in the spring, but until the schools are sure how many pupils are coming, they are reluctant to make job offers.

World Education News and Reviews. Education in Mexico   Teachers are trained at dedicated state-supervised teacher training colleges, the escuelas normales superiores. Teachers at all levels are required to hold a licentiatura-level qualification, which is called the Título Profesional de Educación Normal (Professional Title of Normal Education). 

 

UNITED STATES
Association of American Educators Foundation. AAEF LETTER ON TEACHER DIVERSITY
Dear Secretary DeVos, …We at the Association of American Educators Foundation and the seventy-five undersigned education organizations believe that this is a problem we can all work together to solve and that doing so rewards not only our students, but current and future educators as well. We believe that increasing teacher diversity elevates the teaching profession and improves the lives and outcomes of all students.

Association of Teacher Educators. Distinguished Research in Teacher Education Award. [Submission deadline July 1]

Chalkbeat.
1) I was a white teacher who couldn’t talk about race. A journey through successful U.S. high schools changed my thinking.  …my first year in a new role: director of a new teacher preparation program. The class meets every Thursday for three hours. In it, teachers-in-training talk about racism — their own and that which permeates our society and our schools. I teach the course with two enormously talented colleagues, both women of color… we seek to disrupt two problematic beliefs: the belief that woke white saviors can “enlighten” their racist peers, and the belief that people of color bear sole responsibility for helping others come to terms with patterns of racial oppression.
2) What should new teachers of color know when taking the job? Veterans offer some advice.   Amid a teacher shortage, recruiting an educator in Illinois has become increasingly difficult. Chicago is pulling out all the stops with a series of videos promoting a teaching residency program that offers tuition discounts for apprenticeships in high-need schools.

EdSource. The Key to Minority Student Achievement Might Be Teacher Training Quality   Specifically, districts with low numbers of teachers with “substandard credentials”—which the report authors defined as emergency permits, waivers and intern credentials—achieved better results for all students regardless of race.

Education Week.
1) How Can We Get More Highly Effective Teachers to Serve as Mentors?   Relatively few highly effective teachers take on roles as mentors to student-teachers, researchers say. One solution? Pay them more—a lot more.
2) Joe Biden’s Education Plan: Triple Title I to Boost Teacher Pay and Student Supports   His plan calls for increasing the number of teachers of color by working with historically black colleges and universities and supporting paraprofessionals in obtaining teaching certificates, but it does not outline specific programs to support this work.
3) Most Classroom Teachers Feel Unprepared to Support Students With Disabilities   Overall, the survey respondents indicated the problems begin in teacher preparation programs, well before education students lead a classroom: Many teachers reported they were not required to take courses in working with students with disabilities or found that the courses they did take left them unprepared to work with all students. The work also details how states’ policies for educator certification have set a “low bar” for preparing general educators to teach students with disabilities.
4) Overlooked: How Teacher Training Falls Short for English-Learners and Students With IEPs Administrators must prepare new teachers, even those who had preservice training, to work with English-learners or special education students, because they “have no idea what they don’t know,” Samson said. “They are going to walk into the classroom on that first day and be shell-shocked.”
5) When the PD Plate Is Overfull: Growing requirements for trainings on non-academic issues—everything from food allergies to sexual assault—have made it hard for schools and teachers to keep up   All agreed: The state’s statutory teacher-training requirements, while well-intentioned, could be streamlined. Connecticut administrators estimated it would take 90 hours to adequately train teachers on a list of state-required topics—everything from sexual abuse awareness and food allergies to identifying safety threats and adolescent risk-taking behaviors.

Forbes. Joe Biden Struggles To Lift Heavy Education Baggage   The answer to Biden’s question is that you build the dignity and professionalization of teaching by not elevating shortcuts that diminish the profession (like Teach for America), by not implementing top-down reforms that dictate to teachers how to do their jobs, and by not pumping federal money and support into a parallel system of education premised on the notion that public schools are failing.

Inside Higher Ed. Biden Promises Fix to Public Service Loan Forgiveness   …promised in an education plan released Tuesday to “see to it” that the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program is “fixed, simplified and actually helps teachers.”… And he said he would boost the number of teachers of color enrolled in teacher training programs.

La Revista Jurídica de la Universidad de Puerto Rico. Exit, Voice, And Charter Schools [by S. Abrams, TC National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education]    …in explaining the legendary excellence of the Finnish school system: outside of moving from one region or neighborhood to another, there is no exit in Finland…. This shared educational experience cannot be separated from the country’s heavy investment in high-quality teacher preparation, well-equipped schools, and generous teacher compensation.

National Education Policy Center.  Virtual Schools in the U.S. 2019 [co-author L. Huerta, TC faculty] Recommendations Arising from Section III: Policymakers should: • Define certification training and relevant teacher licensure requirements specific to teaching responsibilities in virtual schools, and require research-based professional development to promote effective online teaching models.

New York Times. How to End the Child-Care Crisis [OpEd by. S. Polakow-Suransky, Bank Street College of Education President]  Step 4 is public financing of teacher training. Unlike other professions, early care is not supported by a system of preparation and ongoing training. Early educators need a deep knowledge of child development and the chance to receive feedback and coaching as they learn.

Philadelphia Inquirer. OPINION:  Black teachers matter. How do we get more in the classroom? As Columbia professor and black educator Chris Emdin remarked, for many black students, returning to school after they leave is like returning to the scene of a crime that hurt them… What does resonate with those who hadn’t previously considered teaching is an opportunity: Become the teacher you wish you had and knew you needed.

Teaching Tolerance. What’s My Complicity? Talking White Fragility With Robin DiAngelo   I am a former professor of education. I’ve worked many years in large, teacher-training programs. I think teachers are critical, and I think, regardless of intentions, when you have an overwhelmingly white teaching force—we have a very racially homogenous teaching force—you inevitably have the reproduction and the dissemination of racism and white supremacy, just by virtue of the homogeneity.

USA Today. Solving the teacher shortage crisis: APSU and CMCSS team up on new program   … first class of aspiring professionals embarking on a free three-year residency and degree program to turn themselves into teachers, as part of a partnership between Clarksville-Montgomery County Schools and Austin Peay State University.

Washington Post. New report on virtual education: ‘It sure sounds good. As it turns out, it’s too good to be true.’   Finally, with regard to teacher quality, they note that “little progress has been made … on issues related to teacher quality in virtual contexts … [and] little attention has been given to the unique challenges related to ensuring an adequate supply of high-quality teachers in virtual schools.”

 

NEW YORK STATE
NYSED.
1) 2019 New York State My Brother’s Keeper Symposium [May 31, Albany]
2) Board of Regents Meeting for June 2019

NYS Senate.
1) S. 5410. Relates to the cumulative grade point average admission requirement for graduate-level teacher and educational leader programs. 5/29/2019 Advanced to Third Reading
2) S. 5985. Relates to the New York state masters-in-education teacher incentive scholarship program. 5/30/2019 Reported and Committed to Finance.

Professional Standards and Practices Board for Teaching. May meeting agenda

 

NEW YORK CITY
Chalkbeat. I changed careers to teach at a Bronx school for students with severe disabilities. Here’s what I wish people knew about my students — and job.   When her son was diagnosed with autism as a toddler, she saw up close the struggles he endured and decided to change careers, going back to school to become a teacher. While pursuing a master’s degree, she taught at a Catholic school in the Bronx.

City University of New York. edTPA Support for CUNY Alumni   The edTPA support course will be offered from May 29th-June 20th at Medgar Evers College (MEC) on Mondays and Wednesdays from 4-6PM in the Library 2037 and The CUNY Graduate Center (GC) on Tuesdays and Thursday from 4:30-6:30PM.  

Queens Daily Eagle. New children’s art nonprofit wins $10,000 from QEDC   Cavadas and Lokken met at Teachers College, Columbia University while pursuing master’s degrees, and after teaching art in New York City, realized there was a potential to expand arts education around the city.

 

GLOBAL
Independent [UK]. Maths and physics teachers to be offered extra cash to stop them leaving profession   Nick Gibb, minister for school standards, said: “Teaching remains a popular career, but we want to make sure that we can continue to attract and keep the brightest and best graduates, particularly in subjects where specialist knowledge and expertise are vital to the future success of the economy.

National Online Teacher Training [UK].  a new approach to teacher training

Raidió Teilifís Éireann (RTE). HEA criticism of teacher training programmes  A review of teacher training programmes in Ireland has criticised the level of fees charged to students studying to become teachers, and says course changes introduced seven years ago have contributed to the current shortage of post-primary teachers.  

 

UNITED STATES
American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education. New AACTE Research-to-Practice Video Series on Special Education Now Available

Atlanta Journal Constitution. Morehouse grads already making plans to pay good fortune forward   Ross Jordan entered Morehouse with half of his tuition paid. Then Robert F. Smith announced he was paying for the rest.. The kinesiology major was bound for Teachers College, Columbia University to earn a master’s degree in physical education saddled with $50,000 in undergraduate loans… After earning his master’s degree, Jordan, 22, plans to find ways to make kinesthetic learning more acceptable in a traditional classroom setting specifically for at-risk students.

Bernie Sanders. A Thurgood Marshall Plan for Public Education   Establish a dedicated fund to create and expand teacher-training programs at HBCUs, minority-serving institutions (MSIs) and tribal colleges and universities to increase educator diversity…. Address the shortage in special education teacher recruitment, training opportunities, and pay for special education teachers.

Chalkbeat.
1) Rural Colorado faces a teacher shortage. University of Colorado Denver has plans to help.   By making high-quality educator preparation programs available in rural communities and recruiting candidates from those communities, administrators hope they can make a real dent in the teacher shortage.
2) Teach for America-Memphis has a new leader for the first time in a decade. What will she do?   For the first time in nine years, Memphis’ largest alternative teacher training program will have a new leader in Nafeesha Mitchell.

Chronicle of Higher Education. Why One Department Trains Its Graduate Students to Teach   The classics department requires graduate students to take a course that introduces them to educational research and encourages them to apply it to teaching in the discipline. The course, which Furman teaches, serves several purposes… Quite a few of its master’s students, he said, go on to teach Latin and related subjects at the high-school level.

Education Week. What’s Harder Than Learning? Unlearning: The biggest impediment to professional change might just be what you already know   Some teacher-preparation programs, for instance, let aspiring teachers practice classroom management and culturally responsive pedagogy with simulated students (who are either played by computer avatars or live actors). Those types of simulations can help change the behavior patterns of teachers, Dede said.

Edutopia. How to Prepare Students to Learn by Teaching: Strategies for having older students teach younger ones, shared by a teacher at a high school career academy for future teachers.   I’m the lead teacher of a high school Academy of Education—the students in my class are learning about becoming educators themselves. These students have a unique opportunity: They get to work with the children at our on-campus preschool, so they have a chance to practice teaching without leaving the building.

Forbes. 8 Things Every School Must Do To Prepare For The 4th Industrial Revolution   5.    Alter educator training  American philosopher John Dewey said, “If we teach today’s students as we taught yesterday’s, we rob them of tomorrow”… Failure needs to be embraced as an essential step to learning. Additionally, teaching will be much more personalized, which will be supported by bringing in technologies such as AI and machine learning.

Inside Higher Education. Making Sense of Metrics   4. The problem of education’s “black box.”This was an overriding theme of the conference specifically articulated by Corbin Campbell of Teachers College Columbia University. Given that learning happens inside individuals and often manifests itself in different ways inside those individuals, it is very difficult to measure what’s happening.

Hechinger Report.
1) How cities are convincing voters to pay higher taxes for public preschool: Seattle, Cincinnati and San Antonio are just three of a growing number of cities to develop high-quality public preschool programs paid for by new local taxes.   Seattle also earned a silver medal in the American Cities report for meeting all 10 standards indicative of high-quality preschools, such as teacher education level, class size, and teacher-student ratio.
2) Lessons from Boston: “no excuses” charter schools kept boosting student test scores after expansion   That led the authors to speculate that the standardization of hiring, training and teaching practices at these “no excuses” charter schools is driving the results. Much like at fast-food restaurants, there’s a lot that each charter school network does identically at every campus… New teachers didn’t write their lessons from scratch. In Boston, experienced teachers from the parent campuses spent a lot of time mentoring teachers in the expansion schools. During the hiring process, network leaders sought new teachers who believed in the school model before they started.

Learning Policy Institute. Preparing Teachers to Support Social and Emotional Learning: A Case Study of San Jose State University and Lakewood Elementary School   This two-part study offers information on how preservice and in-service teacher training can support good teaching practices and implement SEL in schools, while providing a picture of what SEL looks like when integrated into the school day.

Market Watch. More high-school students are using this hack to get a head-start on college — but the poorest students are being left behind  In many jurisdictions, in order for a high-school teacher to qualify to teach a college course, they need not only a master’s degree, but also a significant amount of master-level course work in the specific topic they’re teaching. For schools with limited budgets to pay teachers and challenging environments …that can be a tough find. 

National Center for Education Statistics. The Condition of Education. In 2015–16, some 90 percent of public school teachers held a regular or standard state teaching certificate or advanced professional certificate, 4 percent held a provisional or temporary certificate, 3 percent held a probationary certificate, 1 percent held no certification, and 1 percent held a waiver/emergency certificate. 

Washington Post.
1) If you don’t know what the historic Brown v. Board ruling is but know you should, watch this 6-minute video
2) Report: The effect chronic stress has on children at school — and why policymakers should care   Education reform efforts continue to focus mostly on how higher quality teaching can overcome social and economic challenges. Yet, these efforts have failed to make a meaningful difference in the achievement gap between black and white children. In part, this continued reform focus on in-class factors is the result of a failure to understand the pathways by which social and economic disadvantage contributes to depressed academic performance …

WJOL. Bill Suspending Teacher Basic Skills Test Heads To Governor   A bill suspending the use of a basic skills test for Illinois teacher licensing is headed to Governor J.B. Pritzker’s desk. 

 

NEW YORK STATE
Commission on Independent College and Universities (CICU). (CICU) strongly supports expanding the masters-in-education teacher incentive scholarship program to students choosing to attend a private not-for-profit college or university (A.2404/ S.5985).  We urge you to coordinate with your campus’ government affairs office to send an email to or call Assembly and Senate Higher Education Committee members to request that they place this bill on the higher education committee agenda for a vote. 

My Brother’s Keeper. Changing the Narrative  Teacher Opportunity Corps (TOC) II

New York State Education Department.Proposed Amendments to Sections 52.21 and 80-3.7 of the Regulations of the Commissioner of Education Related to Requiring Study in Language Acquisition and Literacy Development of English Language Learners in Certain Teacher Preparation Programs and in th   The public comment notice was published in the April 24, 2019 NYS Register. Comments must be received by June 23, 2019 Send comments to: Petra Maxwell, NYS Education Department, Office of Higher Education, 89 Washington Avenue, Room 975 EBA, Albany, NY 12234, (518) 474-2238, email: [email protected]

New York State Senate. S. 5410 May 21 vote: AYE/NAY 9/0. Relates to the cumulative grade point average admission requirement for graduate-level teacher and educational leader programs. 

Professional Standards and Practices Board for Teaching.  March meeting minutes.  April meeting minutes

 

NEW YORK CITY
Chalkbeat.
1) New proposal would extend early childcare pipeline from birth to preschool for some NYC children   Stringer’s plan also builds in $25 million to pay for teacher training and education scholarships, which could help strengthen quality.
2) These 17 educators just won top honors from New York City    Through the Teacher Assistant Scholar Program, Ms. Tutelian is training the next generation of math teachers by empowering students to become teacher assistants.
3) To help more New York City teachers get comfortable teaching computer science, Cornell Tech offers a ‘safety net’   This residency model was developed by Cornell Tech to help teachers grow more comfortable delivering lessons in computer science, an increasingly in-demand subject for which, until recently, there was no formal state certification. 

GLOBAL
Deutsche Welle. Millions of Germans have trouble reading and writing   Literacy issues that pop up in adulthood in immigrant and impoverished communities begin in the classroom, requiring a rethink in the way teachers are trained in dealing with at-risk groups, McElvany added… “We simply don’t equip our student teachers enough to deal with the various environments and the various challenges of reality later on.”

TES. Exclusive: Could overseas training help England’s teacher recruitment crisis?   A new overseas teacher-training scheme is being touted as a way of tackling the domestic recruitment crisis by promoting the career’s potential for international travel.

World Didac Association. University of Helsinki and HY+ embark on an extensive education project in Pakistan   The main objective of the project is to offer the University of Helsinki’s expertise in the development and change of the educational culture of a teacher education college in Pakistan. 

 

UNITED STATES
American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education.  AACTE Commends Increase of Teacher Quality Partnership Grant Funds in Draft Funding Bill    Among the programs seeing an increase in funding is the Teacher Quality Partnership (TQP) grant program, the only federal initiative dedicated to strengthening and transforming educator preparation at institutions of higher education.

American Educational Research Association. 2020 Annual Meeting Call for Paper and Session Submissions. San Francisco, April 17-21 [Deadline July 10]

Atlanta Journal Constitution. Will Georgia’s new dyslexia mandate make a difference?   Senate Bill 48, which Kemp signed Thursday, mandates dyslexia screening for every kindergartner. It also requires future teachers to learn the latest research about how to spot and help students who may have it.

Bloomberg. American Students Have Changed Their Majors: Health professions are in, education and the humanities are out. Here are some reasons for the shift.   Education degrees have been in a long decline, so to some extent what has happened is that women switched from teaching to health care.

Chalkbeat. Gov. Whitmer wants universal pre-K by the end of her four-year term. Will there be enough teachers?

Education Week.
1) Florida Governor Signs Divisive Bill Allowing for Armed Teachers   “Sworn police officers undergo extensive firearm training to respond to crisis scenarios, and we continue working on our skills and discipline throughout our careers. Teachers enter that profession to educate children, not to serve as school security,” Tony wrote in a letter to the school board.
2) History Instruction Indicted: Too Much Memorization, Too Little Meaning   But unlike some critics, who fault teacher training or weak course requirements, the report’s authors say bad curriculum is to blame. “Based on our analysis, this is not an issue of whether high school history teachers are adequately prepared or whether children today even study American history in school,” the foundation’s president, Arthur Levine, says in a statement.
3) We Need More Teachers of Color. Let’s Scrap Exams That Keep Them Out of the Classroom   A recent report estimates that each year, the exams screen out approximately 8,600 of 16,900 aspiring teachers of color. That exclusion rate is 27.5 percent higher than for white aspiring teachers. 

Hechinger Report. Twice exceptional, doubly disadvantaged? How schools struggle to serve gifted students with disabilities    Teachers need to be trained to recognize and understand children who are 2e. They need to try to remove the stigma that kids who have a disability cannot be smart.

Inside Higher Ed. Warren Zeroes In on Race   It’s notable that the Warren campaign released an analysis of what debt cancellation would mean for racial groups as well as different income brackets, said Judith Scott-Clayton, an associate professor of economics and education at Teachers College at Columbia University who has studied the racial patterns of student loan defaults.

Medium|Politics. Can Elizabeth Warren Fix Higher Education?  “What the public sees is rising tuition costs,” explains Judy Scott-Clayton, a professor of economics and education at Columbia Teachers College. “If tuition is going up every year, how can it be that institutions actually have fewer resources? The answer is that states have been systematically investing less in higher ed per student than they were 20 to 30 years ago.” This divestment has resulted in a tuition spike as schools raise their prices to recuperate some of the money lost.

National Center for Teacher Residencies. NCTR, Mississippi to Develop the Nation’s First State-Operated Teacher Residency   The National Center for Teacher Residencies has received a $649,366 grant from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation to support the Mississippi Department of Education in the development of the nation’s first state-run teacher residency.

U.S. News & World Report. Illinois Lawmakers to Consider New Teacher Testing Methods   Two bills are pending in the Illinois General Assembly that would pause or permanently eliminate a basic skills test for new teachers that some officials say has contributed to a statewide shortage of educators

Washington Post.
1) California is overhauling sex education guidance for schools — and religious conservatives don’t like it   Tony Thurmond, the state’s newly elected education secretary, said teachers will have to undergo training to learn how to present the material in class.
2) Kindergarten teacher: ‘Why our youngest learners are doomed right out of the gate’ — and a road map to fix it  I would like to borrow a profoundly important document from brilliant teacher, child specialist and pre-eminent teacher trainer, Jean Feldman. I believe that when we adhere to the Kindergarten Bill of Rights…we will no longer hear that our youngsters are disinterested, hating kindergarten, acting out and “failing” because they are not yet reading.

 

NEW YORK STATE
NYSATE/NYACTE. 2019 Annual Fall Conference Saratoga Springs, October 16-18 [Proposals due May 15] 

NYSED Board of Regents. May Meetings
P-12 Education/Higher Education Joint Meeting
Classroom Academy – A Teacher Residency Program Update Presentation on the Teacher Residency Program in Queensbury, New York.

Higher Education
Proposed Amendment to Sections 52.21 of the Regulations of the Commissioner of Education Relating to the Requirements for Transitional D Programs that Lead to School District Leader Certification
Proposed Amendments to Section 80-6.1 of the Regulations of the Commissioner of Education Relating to Continuing Teacher and Leader Education (CTLE) for Educators in Nonpublic Schools
Proposed Amendment to Section 80-1.5 of the Regulations of the Commissioner of Education Relating to the Creation of Safety Nets for the Science Content Specialty Tests (CSTs)
Proposed Amendment to Section 80-5.17 of the Regulations of the Commissioner of Education Relating to the Conditional Initial Certificate Requirements

Definition of “University” in New York State

NYSED News. State Education Department Announces Recipients of 2019 Vice Chancellor Emerita Adelaide L. Sanford Scholarships   Also since 2016, NYSED awarded $9 million in Teacher Opportunity Corps II (TOC) grants to increase the participation rate of historically underrepresented and economically disadvantaged individuals in teaching careers. NYSED awarded grants to 16 colleges and universities…

Times Union. Schools struggle to find teachers for English language learners   The report maintains that a state requirement, which mandates that English language learners receive English as a new language instruction, has contributed to the shortage of qualified teachers. It concludes that incentives could be offered by school districts to encourage teachers to get dual-certification so they can fill this need.

 

NEW YORK CITY
Chalkbeat. I teach pre-K in NYC. My job is not babysitting. This is what I really do and why pay matters.   Entrieri seized the opportunity, completing her master’s and passing the certification exams required to continue teaching…But the process of becoming a teacher, she says, has left her with mountains of debt. And because her job doesn’t offer benefits, she is living paycheck-to-paycheck, forced to make tough choices about whether to pay back her student loans or purchase health insurance. 

Teaching Residents @ Teachers College. May 2019 | Spring Edition Newsletter

GLOBAL
BBC News. Lack of teachers hampering Irish-medium secondary sector  Mícheál Mac Giolla Gunna, head teacher of Coláiste Feirste in west Belfast – the largest Irish-medium school in Northern Ireland with about 650 pupils – said there was an urgent need to plan for the training of new teachers to meet the needs of a rapidly growing sector.

Education International. Iraq: Teacher union invests in facilities to improve education in Kurdistan   KTU President Abdulwahed Mohamed reaffirmed that his education union should “… be able to provide teachers with the best possible services in terms of holding training courses, improving cultural and scientific levels, and generating interest in research focusing on persons with special needs as well as focusing on environmental protection”.

Inside Higher Ed. Iceland’s Missing Male Students: Sixty-four percent of students are women, the highest percentage of any European nation.  Courses with scarcely any men, such as playschool teacher education and social service counseling, have started to award male-only scholarships to redress the balance, explained Heijstra.

Washington Post. Quebec ban on religious symbols would fall heavily on hijab-wearing teachers   New teachers would be affected most by the bill… Chahira Battou is set to graduate this spring from teachers college. “The thing is that if I submit to the law, and I remove my scarf when I go to teach, that is when I become a submissive woman,” said Battou, 29.

 

UNITED STATES
American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education (AACTE). 1) Call for Entries: 2020 AACTE Awards; 2) Call for Board and Standing Committee Nominations; 3) Call for Proposals, Reviewers for 2020 AACTE Annual Meeting “Disrupting Inequities: Educating for Change” [Login required]

AP. School safety at forefront of teacher rally after shooting  RALEIGH, N.C…The nearly $24 billion spending package includes money to raise teacher pay on average by 4.6%, with increases weighted toward the most veteran educators. A 10% salary supplement for teachers with master’s degrees, phased out earlier this decade, would be restored.

Atlanta Journal Constitution. Researcher says we lose too many teachers and lack of autonomy is a big factor   Since the late 1980s, the number of minority elementary and secondary teachers has increased by over 100%, outpacing growth in the number of nonminority teachers and outpacing growth in minority students.

Chalkbeat. With loan forgiveness and stipends, Colorado lawmakers hope to lure teachers to rural districts   All told, state education officials say there are 800 more people in the “pipeline,” preparing for teaching careers, than there were two years ago. But Colorado will need a lot more people to enter teaching — and stay in the classroom — to fill vacancies and replace thousands of educators expected to retire in the coming decade.

Education Week.
1) 4 Things You Need to Know About ‘Free College’ Proposals
2) A RedForEd Wave: Teachers in North and South Carolina Leave Classrooms in Protest   The protest was organized by the N.C. Association of Educators, with support from the grassroots group Red4EdNC. Teachers are asking for a 5 percent raise, extra compensation for advanced degrees…
3) Battle Over Reading: Parents of Children With Dyslexia Wage Curriculum War   In Arkansas, lawmakers have passed at least eight laws in the past seven years. The state is changing everything, including dyslexia screening, reading instruction, and teacher training and licensing.
4) College of Education Now Prepares Teachers in the Science of Reading [YouTube video; Univ. of Central Arkansas]
5) Defying Trump, Democrats Propose $4.4 Billion Boost for Education Spending  Trump wants to eliminate three prominent department programs: state grants for educator training, after-school activities, and block grants for student support and academic enrichment. Democrats want more money for all three… 

Hechinger Report.
1) 7 in 10 students aren’t writing at grade level — we can do better   In addition, a recent study from Teachers College, Columbia University, analyzed the implementation of WITsi in New York City’s most struggling Renewal High Schools between 2014 and 2016, and found that WITsi students were almost two and a half times more likely to be on track to graduate than students in schools without the approach.
2) Teachers go to school on racial bias   “Teachers want and need a space to talk about this. It feels useful. You feel the practicality of it.” This kind of dialogue, she said, was largely absent from her graduate school teacher-training program, where issues of race and bias were rarely mentioned.

NEA Today. Rodney Robinson Named 2019 National Teacher of the Year   Robinson… earned a bachelor’s degree in history from Virginia State University and a master’s degree in administration and supervision from Virginia Commonwealth University. 

NPR. Teachers Begin To See Unfair Student Loans Disappear   In exchange for agreeing to work in low-income schools, aspiring teachers could get federal Teacher Education Assistance for College and Higher Education (TEACH) Grants from the department to help pay their way through college. But those grants were often unfairly turned into loans that teachers had to pay back… Now, that fix has been expanded, and thousands more teachers are likely to get help.

New York Magazine. Years of Low Pay Helped Spark the Teacher Strike Wave   …NEA president Lily Eskelsen-Garcia said that when the union asks colleges of education why they’d experienced what she calls “a precipitous drop” in the number of prospective teachers, they cited low pay and student loans as deterrents.

New York Times.
1) Elizabeth Warren Wants to Cancel Student Loans. Critics Wonder if That’s the Right Solution.  In a post on Medium announcing the plan on Monday, Ms. Warren talked about how she, as an aspiring young teacher, had paid just $50 in tuition a semester at the University of Houston. “I could afford it on a part-time waitressing salary,” she said.
2) Still Separate, Still Unequal: Teaching about School Segregation and Educational Inequality

Penn State News. New process of teaching literacy to future teachers gets rave reviews   The PDS program is a collaboration between the College of Education and State College Area School District (SCASD) in which student teachers follow the schedule of a full academic year from August to June. The SCASD instructional coaches learned the collaborative learning experience at Teachers College at Columbia University in New York City.

Phi Delta Kappan. Toward equality of educational opportunity: What’s most promising?  In teaching, not all preparation institutions must meet rigorous standards. And not all candidates for teaching must meet rigorous standards before being allowed into the classroom. In other words, the teacher credentialing system is rife with loopholes, resulting in a teaching force of varied and uncertain quality.

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Clarion University will relaunch a stand-alone School of Education   “This is necessary to be able to address the existing teacher shortage in special education, math and sciences, and the looming teacher shortage in all areas,” said Pam Gent, provost. “It is also necessary as we begin to pilot new and innovative ways to educate future teachers…”

Univ. of Texas at San Antonio. UTSA Teacher Residency Program produces first graduates

U.S. Dept. of Education. Teacher Quality Partnership (TQP) Grant Program CFDA Number 84.336S [Deadline for Transmittal of Applications: May 20, 2019]

U.S. News & World Report. Teacher Salaries Fell 4.5% Over the Last Decade  “When we go into colleges of education and ask them why they’ve seen a drop in the number of people applying to teacher colleges, they keep saying that these are prospective teachers who have to look at the pay they are going to receive as new teachers. And they are saying, ‘We won’t be able to pay off our student loans for that,'” Eskelsen García said. “People who want to be teachers are going into other professions because of the pay gap.”

 

NEW YORK STATE
Chalkbeat. New York State leaders want teachers to spend more time learning how to help English learners   Right now, students studying to be teachers in New York are required to spend six semester hours learning about language acquisition and literacy. Last month, state education policymakers proposed requiring teacher preparation programs to dedicate three of those hours to how English language learners learn and acquire language.

NYSED Office of Higher Education. April Newsletter
1) New Director of Teacher Certification
2) Expiring CST Safety Nets
3) Regulatory Amendment: Student Teaching Requirement
4) Proposal: Language Acquisition and Literacy Development Coursework Requirement
5) Proposal: School Counselor Education Program Registration Requirements and Certification
6) Proposal: Professional Learning and CTLE for Teachers Who Work with Teacher Candidates

New York State Register.
1) The public comment period is now open on a proposed amendment to extend the edTPA safety net for candidates who receive a failing score on the Library Specialist edTPA.
2) The public comment period is now open on a proposed amendment to extend the Educational Technology Specialist Content Specialty Test (CST) safety net expiration date.

Professional Standards and Practices Board for Teaching. April meeting agenda

 

NEW YORK CITY
Chalkbeat. In a last-minute reversal, union representing thousands of NYC pre-K teachers calls off strike — for now   Teachers in community-run programs earn salaries starting around $42,000, while those in traditional public schools, who are represented by the United Federation of Teachers, start around $59,000. Regardless of the setting they work in, teachers are ultimately required to earn the same credentials and perform the same work.

NYCDOE. 2019-2020 Calendar [with corrected dates]

Washington Post. Teacher Appreciation Week is coming, and this educator is starting to cringe: ‘I’ll trade appreciation for respect any day’  In New York City, most teachers attain master’s degrees before they ever begin work or finish them within the first few years… We are not seen as the “experts” in the very area that we have not only studied fastidiously, but also proved ourselves to be successful.