Open Wide and Relax. I'm a Professional Educator.

I have in the past posited on this blog that current programs of teacher education probably have negative effects—that someone with subject knowledge and common sense would do better at teaching than someone with specific training in “Education.” But are there any statistics available to bear this out?

There are. An ongoing teacher shortage in the US has prompted many states to set up “alternative certification programs,” to partly bypass teachers' colleges. The program called “Teach For America,” meets this teacher shortage by signing on university grads with strong academic records or records of extracurricular leadership but without teaching credentials and placing them in inner-city schools for two years, in return for a scholarship.

The result: according to several studies, “Teach For America” teachers acheive better results for their students than fully-credentialed teachers. If the evidence is not entirely clear, at worst, there seems to be no case left for the value of a degree in Education.

According to Wikipedia:

“In a study published by the Urban Institute and the Calder Center in March 2008, the authors found 'that TFA teachers tend to have a positive effect on high school student test scores relative to non-TFA teachers .... Such effects exceed the impact of additional years of experience and are particularly strong in math and science.'"

“Mathematica Policy Research also addressed this question in a study published in June 2004. The study compared the gains in reading and math achievement made by students randomly assigned to TFA teachers or other teachers in the same school. The results showed that, on average, students with TFA teachers raised their mathematics test scores 0.15 standard deviations more than the gains made by other students. This is equivalent to students having received one extra month of instruction. ...”

- Wikipedia, “Teach for America”

This latter study is cited by “Education Next” as having particularly sound methodology—at least as education studies go. This study also suggested that starting TFA instructors did better than Education grads with years of classroom experience.

Unfortunately, the data are not as clean-cut as they might be. States still require some form of “alternative certification” for TFA participants, and these certification processes remain largely controlled by the Ed. Schools. So the most we can really say is that less exposure to Education Schools seems better than more.

TFA has also, interestingly enough, lost its federal funding.