Educating Preservice Teachers: The State of Affairs
Teacher Quality and Student Achievement: State Policy Evidence
Ensuring quality and alignment in preservice teacher education also should be examined at the state level. Darling-Hammond (2000) provides useful teacher-qualification information gleaned from state surveys, state case analyses, the Schools and Staffing Surveys (SASS), and the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). She provides quantitative and qualitative evidence that there is a link between teacher qualifications and student performance. Her findings underscore the importance of improving teacher preservice programs because improvements in teacher preparation are expected to lead to improvements in student performance. Her findings specifically relate to improving preservice teacher education.
Darling-Hammond's (2000) results indicated that teacher preparation and certification are stronger correlates of student achievement in reading than student socioeconomic status, language status, class size, spending levels, and teacher salaries. The implications of these results suggest that states wishing to improve student achievement should concern themselves with the preparation of the teachers they hire (Darling-Hammond, 2000). Further, she indicates that states can have an impact upon the qualifications of teachers hired through the use of policy:
"States that repeatedly lead the nation in student achievement in mathematics and reading have among the most highly qualified teachers in the country and have made longstanding investments in the quality of teaching.... The three leaders—Minnesota, North Dakota, and Iowa—have all had a long history of professional-teacher policy and are among the 12 states that have state professional standards boards which have enacted high standards for persons entering the teaching profession. They are recently joined at the top by Wisconsin, Maine, and Montana, states that have also enacted rigorous standards for teaching and that are among the few which rarely hire unqualified teachers on substandard licenses. Iowa, Minnesota, Montana, North Dakota, and Wisconsin have some of the lowest rates of out-of-field teaching in the country and among the highest proportions of teachers holding both certification and a major in the field they teach.... Maine joined these states in requiring certification plus a disciplinary major when it revised its licensing standards in 1988." (Darling-Hammond, 2000)