Carnegie Reporter, Vol. 3, No. 2 | Alternative Paths to Teacher Certification, page 3

The Two-for-One Route: Certification
Plus a Master’s Degree in Education
Established with discretionary funds in 2000 specifically to fill vacancies in some of New York City’s lowest performing schools, located primarily in economically depressed areas of the Bronx and Brooklyn, the New York City Teaching Fellows Program simultaneously prepares its participants for certification and enrolls them in a subsidized Master of Education program. Courses such as “Classroom Organization” and “Skillful Teaching: Strategies for Effective Instruction and Classroom Management,” offered by a dozen local public and private colleges and universities, are required courses for all participants. A two-month pre-service training experience includes field work consisting of assisting and observing in classrooms and regular advisory meetings in which Fellows meet to share experiences and get instruction in classroom skills and management techniques as well as master’s degree coursework. After completing the pre-service training, Fellows become teachers of record for the next two years while they complete their master’s degree coursework and receive both school- and university-based mentoring as part of their in-service training. Each year, the program surveys participating Fellows to find out whether their expectations about the program have been met and whether they view their preparation as satisfactory. In effect, they are asked “Now how do you feel?” says Vicki Bernstein, who developed and runs the Teaching Fellows Program. The data collected, she explains, are used to make program adjustments.

The program provides Fellows with a range of support services, including workshops, meetings, and social gatherings; Fellows receive a bi-monthly Teaching Fellows newsletter, The Fellows’ Forum, as well as weekly e-mails from the program office. Fellows are encouraged to ask questions and are promised a response within 48 hours. A new mentoring initiative includes monthly meetings between Fellows and their respective mentors. “Feedback,” says Bernstein, is “essential and welcome,” and ongoing, two-way communication is encouraged and highly prized.

Roughly one out of five of the candidates who apply to the New York City Teaching Fellows Program is accepted. With average undergraduate GPAs of 3.3, and 24 percent of the Fellows holding another graduate degree prior to entering the program, participants are “highly qualified and competent,” says Bernstein. The average age of the Fellows is 29, so most have had work experiences in other areas. Some of the Fellows say that they always wanted to be a teacher, explains Bernstein, but for a variety of reasons never attained their goal. For many, the Teaching Fellows Program represents an opportunity “to do something more meaningful in their lives,” she adds. The program is new, of course, and the fact that “the retention rates have improved over the last couple of years,” with 86 percent returning to teach a second year, is a hopeful sign but not necessarily a harbinger of things to come. “We hope most of them will stay,” says Bernstein, “but realistically, we know that people will change careers, both in and out of education.”

The central goal of the New York City Teaching Fellows Program is to accelerate the process of bringing new teachers into classrooms where they are needed most, to teach subjects for which there is the greatest need—English, Spanish, math, science, bilingual education and special education. Although candidates are asked for their preferences regarding placement, assignments are primarily driven by the specific needs of schools and by each Fellow’s qualifications and subject matter expertise. Ultimately, they are expected to be “flexible”—and they are. “Most of our folks wind up teaching in the Bronx and Central Brooklyn,” explains Bernstein. Even allowing for the wobbly economy of the last few years, there has been no shortage of applicants. In a city that employs many thousands of public school teachers, however, the 2,000 New York City Teaching Fellows clearly will not fill the gap between supply and demand for qualified teachers in the city’s underserved communities. However, Bernstein says, the program is “a significant investment” designed to narrow that gap.

“Grow Your Own”: An Alternative Route for
Paraprofessionals and Teacher Aides
There was no shortage of teachers in the Milwaukee public schools in 1987 when the Metropolitan Multicultural Teacher Education Program (MMTEP) was established as an alternative teacher education program, explains Linda Post, department chair of curriculum and instruction at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. What prompted the creation of MMTEP in 1989, Post explains, was the realization that teachers in Milwaukee schools did not reflect the racial and ethnic composition of the students they taught. In 1987, 68 percent of the Milwaukee public schools’ student population consisted of students of color, while only 18 percent of the district’s teachers represented minority groups. At the same time, minority students were underrepresented in colleges and universities—including those offering teacher education programs—which virtually guaranteed a shortage of potential teachers of color in the pipeline.

Many students of color, however, were enrolling in community colleges in a range of program areas. Many of these students found paraprofessional positions in urban public schools to support themselves while they pursued their baccalaureate degrees, a process that, given family and job obligations, was often protracted. An added impetus to the creation of MMTEP was the poor retention rate of teachers in the Milwaukee public schools—approximately 50 percent left within 3–5 years. The notion of “growing your own [teachers]” became a strategy for recruiting and training prospective teachers who had ties to the community and who would be more likely to make a long-term commitment to teaching within the community.

Ultimately, the establishment of MMTEP was the result of a collaboration of the Milwaukee Public Schools, the Milwaukee Teachers’ Education Association, the Milwaukee Area Technical College and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Applicants to MMTEP must have a bachelor’s degree and have been a paraprofessional or teacher aide in the Milwaukee public schools for at least a year; they must also be qualified for admission as post-baccalaureate students to the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee School of Education and perform satisfactorily in interviews and background checks by both the university and Milwaukee Public Schools.

Intense and “resource-rich,” says Post, the program is deliberately kept small—on average, only 20 candidates are selected out of the 75–100 who apply. “MMTEP will never be huge,” she declares. “I just don’t know how you could do it with large numbers.” Participants are called “residents” rather than “interns” to distinguish them from other pre-service training programs. MMTEP residents participate in a six-week summer session during which they take university classes and teach in Milwaukee public school classrooms with a master teacher. They are paid a teacher’s hourly rate for five hours a day during the six weeks. Whether they continue in the program rests heavily on a positive evaluation of their ability to relate to the children and on their readiness to assume full-time teaching duties.

Explains Post, “Many have good rapport with kids but if they don’t use their rapport to focus on instruction, we throw them out!” She adds. “We haven’t found a way to screen for organizational skills.”

During the year of residency that follows, participants serve as teachers of record in grades 1 through 8—while on leave from their paraprofessional or teaching aide position—and receive a full beginning teacher’s salary with fringe benefits. Like the New York City Fellows, residents are not left to struggle on their own. MMTEP residents enjoy the support of a mentor who visits the classroom at least once a week. While mentors spend one day a week with teachers, “they may spend the rest of the week on the phone with them,” says Post. Mentors and residents often “become best friends,” she adds, “but mentors do not evaluate [residents].” Without the responsibility of evaluating the resident, which is left to the resident’s university supervisor, mentor and resident are encouraged to enjoy a relationship based on trust and support.

The mentor-resident ratio is an astounding one mentor for every four teachers-in-residence. With an experienced master teacher in the classroom on a regular basis, residents are able to work with mentors as co-teachers and co-planners. In the meantime, residents continue their university coursework. It is only upon successful completion of the program that the resident is guaranteed a teaching contract with Milwaukee Public Schools. “If we counsel them out after one year,” says Post, “they’re gone.” Because the teacher’s union views the residency as a year of training, not employment, it does not represent certification candidates who have been “deselected.” If things don’t work out for candidates, they can return to their former positions as paraprofessionals or aides.

A ten-year study of MMTEP conducted in 1999 by Martin Haberman, co-founder of MMTEP with Linda Post, showed that a decade after graduation, 94 percent of MMTEP graduates were still teaching in Milwaukee public schools—many of them in the same schools in which they had been working as paraprofessionals and aides—and 96 percent of them received performance ratings of satisfactory or exemplary from their current principals. Data are being collected to update the study.

Today, the resource viewed as precious by MMTEP—paraprofessionals and teaching aides with strong ties to the community—is itself in peril. “In large school districts,” explains Post, “paraprofessionals and aides are being cut.” These are the very people, she says, who, “if they had a chance, would like to become teachers. . . . [Yet] here we are recruiting abroad.”

Next page: It would be hard to think of two alternative routes to teaching more dissimilar in design, yet more united in purpose, than MMTEP and Teach for America.

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