Ed. Programs 'Chaotic'

Find Teachers Not Schooled Properly

By HOWARD MEGDAL

The city's Department of Education responded to a report critical of public school Teacher training last week by pointing to its own pilot program to deal with the weaknesses cited in the report.

The author of the report, Arthur Levine, the former president of Columbia Teachers College, said that "Teacher education right now is the Dodge City of education, unruly and chaotic." He said many university teaching programs have low admission and graduation standards, while their curricula do little to prepare Teachers for the day-to-day life of the profession.

DOE Studying Problems

The DOE, frustrated by these shortcomings, partnered with the City University of New York's Teacher Academy and New York University's master's degree teaching programs to create the New York City Partnership for Teacher Excellence, a four-year study of these problems, in an attempt to create more effective training for educators.

"After reading Art Levine's reports, we are confident that we are on the right track," Program Director Amy McIntosh said in a Sept. 21 phone interview. "Because of some of the weak spots Levine cited in his report, [Schools Chancellor] Joel Klein and these universities hired me to solve them."

The program costs $15 million, and is paid for by a grant from the Carroll and Milton Petrie foundation. Thirty-six city schools volunteered to be "host schools," where Teachers are trained with far more time in-class than at most training programs, according to Ms. McIntosh.

"They'll really be immersed in the school community," she said. "Too often today, student teachers have very little practice, very little impact on the schools they're in, and the schools have very little affect on them."

Many Teachers from the host schools will be co-teaching the courses; many of the courses themselves will be on-site. "We are really taking teaching out of the ivory tower, and bringing it into the host schools," Ms. McIntosh said.

She did not elaborate on how Teachers would be trained to apply the flood of new data provided by the new DOE testing program, which will begin evaluating students based on exams every six weeks.

"Good Teachers use a full variety of data to determine how students are doing," she said. "It's a circle - you apply the lessons from those tests into the data, and the data into those lessons. The new programs will explicitly give the Teachers the skills they need to improve student learning based on the data they receive."

Despite cautioning that "we have more work to do," with the initiative still in its first year, Ms. McIntosh is optimistic about the success of her program.

"I'm certain we're on the right track, and Art Levine's report helps validate that we're on the right track. I know we're going to make great Teachers for the kids in New York City."