Issue: Education
Topic: Teacher Quality
Background
At the heart of our education work is the belief—well-grounded in the research literature—that excellent teachers are key to educational opportunity. Excellent teachers year after year can help students to overcome the challenges of poverty and graduate prepared for success in college and career, while ineffective teachers can stall and reverse the gains they have made.
See section below for new resources and updates.
Preparation
We are advocating for state policies that will ensure access to fully-prepared and effective teachers for all students, in every classroom, every year. Because California still has far to go to achieve this goal, we also advocate for policies to promote equitable access to fully-prepared and effective teachers and to oppose policies that result in the disproportionate concentration of underprepared and ineffective teachers in high-need schools and classrooms. For too long in California and nationwide, our highest-need students have been subjected to the least-prepared and least-experienced teachers, with disastrous consequences for their education.
We’ve already achieved significant victories in this work, including winning state laws as part of the 2004 Williams v. California settlement to ensure English learner (EL) students are taught by teachers who have the specialized training to meet their academic needs, to end districts’ practices of staffing classrooms with rotating substitute teachers for months at a time, and to strengthen state oversight of teacher misassignments (when teachers are assigned to classes that they are not qualified or credentialed to teach).
In 2007, we successfully advocated for the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing (CTC) to raise preservice training standards for intern teachers, who both work as full-time teachers while undergoing their teacher training and are disproportionately assigned to schools serving low-income and minority students.
In 2013, we led a successful effort to enforce the legal rights EL students won in Williams when the CTC adopted a number of policies to strengthen the supervision, support and pre-service training that intern teachers receive to teach English learners.
Effectiveness
We recognize that teacher preparation is only one side of the equation. We also need stronger state policies to ensure that novice teachers prove themselves effective once they enter the classroom and that veteran teachers remain so. Unfortunately, given California’s broken teacher evaluation system today, large numbers of teachers capable of improving are not being supported to achieve their greatest potential, and some ineffective teachers are remaining in the classroom year after year without evaluation or.professional growth.
In 2006, we advocated for a state law, SB 1655, to end the so-called “dance of the lemons” by allowing principals at low-performing schools to refuse any voluntary transfer of a teacher to their school and requiring that seniority-based voluntary-transfer processes be completed by April 15, thereby freeing principals to consider all teacher candidates equally after this date.
In recent years, we’ve been at the center of the teacher evaluation debates, advocating for a new statewide teacher evaluation and support system that first measures a teacher’s effectiveness based on multiple measures of teacher practice, student learning, and professional contributions to the school as a whole and then uses the results of these multi-faceted evaluations to guide professional development and personnel decisions. We and many of our grassroots allies supported the AB 5 teacher evaluation bill in 2011-2012, and we are weighing in on the numerous teacher evaluation bills being considered in 2013. Learn more by reading our analysis of the contentious AB 5 debate, and our legislative agenda for 2013.
In 2012, Public Advocates participated as a member of the Educator Excellence Task Force convened by the California Department of Education and the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing. The Task Force’s report, Greatness by Design: Supporting Outstanding Teaching to Sustain a Golden State, lays out a vision for an excellent educator workforce in California. We support that vision and are fighting for state policy changes designed to make it a reality.
New Resources and Updates
From the Learning Policy Institute comes an important tool to understand how schools are impacted by California’s teacher shortages. Public Advocates’ Rigel Massaro was consulted on the project.
Interactive Map: Understanding Teacher Shortages in California
How are CA school districts and Counties impacted by the state’s persistent teacher shortages? An interactive map enables policymakers, advocates, parents, caregivers, and others to answer that question by exploring data in critical areas.
