A r c h i v e d  I n f o r m a t i o n

DR. DENNIS BARTELS: Thank you very much, Senator.

I should tell you the reason why 15 minutes keeps coming up in all of our speeches is the staff warned us ahead of time that the Senator has no problem cutting us off at the knees when we hit that moment. So I think that's why all of us are moving as quickly as we can through our presentations. I won't say what you really said. But it's been a delight to work with the staff. It's actually a supreme delight to be here today with you and with this incredibly important and extraordinary charge that this commission has before it.

I come from the Exploratorium. The Exploratorium is the house that Frank Oppenheimer built, who some of you may know is the younger brother of Robert Oppenheimer of the Manhattan Project fame. And he built what has been called sort of the ultimate physics playground where we have 600 science interactive teaching exhibits at our disposal. Many of you may know this place, but probably not many of you know that we've been in the teacher development business for 22 years. And at this point we've worked with over 2,000 teachers, alumni, active alumni, science and mathematics teachers in the Bay Area, more than half of whom keep coming back to us for inservice throughout their entire career.

We produced last year about 100,000 hours of professional development for teachers, and we have two very large programs. Both that receive significant support from the National Science Foundation. The first works with elementary science school teachers, was actually four years ago funded as one of five national centers to accelerate elementary school reforms, specializing in inquiry and this particular program, I just want to point out, even though it's not the topic of my discussion, has moved up from working with teachers to working with staff developers. So one important issue I want to place before the commission is who is worrying about the education of staff developers, and helping them create powerful, quality designs of learning for teachers. I would submit not many folks are worrying about that one. But that's not what I'm here today to talk about.

It's our other program, our middle and high school program, which two years ago in 1998 was funded as a pilot teacher induction program, at that time the only one we are aware of that was discipline based specifically for science teachers. We received pilot funding from the National Science Foundation, from the Noyce Foundation, which of course has ties to INTEL Corporation, and from a postsecondary Eisenhower grant, which was very significant in getting it started.

And I also want to introduce my colleagues Dr. Linda Shore, who conceived this program and is also the director of it, and you'll have a chance to interact with her during the discussion session. But she's the one who really understands this work at its greatest detail.

We've learned a lot of things. We're not taking the program to scale. What I would love to do, and I'm so tempted to do, is tell you about all the different lessons we've learned doing this work, because we've learned one heck of a lot of stuff. But, actually that's not my purpose. I hope we can bring that into the discussion. What I'd rather do is bring a different message to you, and to this commission, that a focus, taking up the issue of teacher induction may be the single most critical thing that this commission can do for the nation. And I'll have to back that story up, so let me try my best.

The first thing, let me do it by starting with a small story. In our coaches' training, because we have coaches who are released fully from the classrooms to work with our novice teachers, that turns out to be critically important. We have them inside our institute to prepare them to think about their first year of teaching, and to remember it, actually write about it, get a bottle of scotch if they needed to, go back to those first vivid days when they were teachers and just to go back and remember and report back out the next day what they did recall. And we expected all the horror stories, right. Five different preps, didn't have my own classroom, couldn't find any help at all.

And we were surprised. Half the stories actually were that way, horror stories, but the other half of the stories were absolutely beautiful, these lifelong friendships, these colleagues, these people across the hall who came in and helped that first teacher make it through their classroom that first year, you know, friendships that lasted 20, 25, 30 years, going forward. And what really hit us was that whether you got that support or not was left up to complete random chance. It was complete serendipity whether you just had a caring colleague next door or not, or down the hall. And that, in fact, there is no system to support beginning teachers in this country, and that is tragic.

Let me just give you a sense of the magnitude of this problem. In the State of California last year we needed 26,000 new teachers just to make up for the class size reduction mandates, another 4,000 needed to fill positions created by the booming enrollments in the state, 7,000 teachers were needed to replace retiring teachers, and 15,000 new teachers were needed to replace teachers who were leaving for reasons other than retirement, so the attrition rate. So that's 52,000 teachers. The state's teaching force is only 284,000 teachers. So one out of five teachers were new to the classroom. At the same time the state college system, and the independent system, only produced about 17,000 teachers to be credentialed a year, and only about half of those actually go into teaching.

So where does the state make up this 40,000 teacher difference? Fully one-fourth of the teachers do not have the credentials to teach the subject they are teaching, 13 percent are emergency credentials, another 10,000 came in out of retirement, but of course you can imagine the situation is even worse in math and science. In math and science alone you have a one in three chance as a middle school or high school student of catching a teacher in their first or second year. And we know even the very best teachers over time never, ever do their best teaching in the first and second year. This is a huge impact. Think about it for a second. If I have a one in three chance of getting a teacher in their first or second year of teaching, and we also know from a recent study that if I'm a person of color or I'm from poverty, I'm five times more likely to hit that teacher than not, I mean, the mathematicians can -- but random chance is one-third. Then you times it by five. I'm virtually guaranteed as a minority student percentage of catching a new teacher or an unqualified teacher in the state.

So this is not a unique California problem. It turns out across the country the same policies that created our crisis -- the reducing class size, the new teacher certification systems, beginning teacher work -- are hitting classrooms across the country. And in fact, in a survey last year there were 37 states, 21 were considering or starting beginning teacher programs, but it turns out only 9 provided any sort of funding for them. Most of them were unfunded mandates to the local school systems just to help those new teachers. But no system was in place, no guidance whatsoever. So I find this one a staggering opportunity. If you look at this new generation coming in and the opportunities, the states have moved up a couple of years ago from putting about $20 million into the beginning teacher programs to last year about $80 million, and that number is going to continue to rise, a great opportunity to influence the direction of these beginning teacher programs.

Here's another reason why I think it's so critically important, and that is that we've learned from research now that the first two years of teaching may be the most critical and steepest part of a teacher's learning curve; that even in reform minded teacher preparation programs, that, in fact, when a teacher hits those first couple of years there's an immediate conservation effect; it's the first time without a safety net; and so they go right back to the textbooks and right back to their traditional methods. And that, in fact, the patterns and habits that they form in those first two years have a much greater impact on the ways they'll teach for the rest of their careers than whatever education they receive in the preparation programs.

A helpful analogy I might give to you is that of a parent. As a parent waiting for your first born you have all the theory, right? You've read all the books: what to expect when you're expecting. You get great advice from your family and friends, and then suddenly that baby arrives. And all that goes straight out the door and you're operating completely by instinct and survival. How many of you are parents? I know there's more than a few of you who know this feeling. And then one, two, three years later suddenly, in fact, some of that theory comes back and some of that advice comes back, and you get much better as you go along. Well, I think the same is true for beginning teachers.

Which brings up another point, which is that beginning teachers are completely different. They are a unique animal, they are qualitatively different, their needs are qualitatively different than those of teacher candidates or veteran teachers. That's all to say that we need a new model or a different type of institution to serve beginning teachers. That's not simply taking the inservice we've always done and dropping it into the first two years, nor taking those pre-service programs and extending them out for a couple of years. But, in fact, we need something different.

Another point there is that I really firmly believe that these programs must be discipline based. Why do I believe that? You have to ask the question, what are you inducting these teachers into anyway? Most states as they start these programs are putting in what I would call generic programs. They're very good programs, and they do focus on teaching and learning, but they never get down to the content specific areas. That was really true up to a couple of years ago when Connecticut, which we'll hear from in a second from Michal, and California started to worry about discipline base. But if all you're doing is inducting them into a beginning teacher program, the problem with that is in two years they're no longer a beginning teacher, the label fades away, and they're left out there again. But if you're inducting them into communities of practicing exemplary science teachers, many of which exist across this country, many funded and started by the National Science Foundation, others done by the states -- Gary Hart will be with us later on this afternoon -- the California Subject Matter Projects, the systemic initiatives, et cetera, then they never go away; they become part of your ongoing community of practice forever.

So I think we need a new model. So let me just for a second - Linda, thank you for these transparencies -- here's the old model. One thing I think we need to stop doing is expecting the colleges to do it all. If you could go ahead and please turn the AV on please, the overhead. [See Slide 1] I think one huge disservice that we've done is we've asked colleges in a one or two-year program to give a teacher everything they could possibly need to teach for the rest of their career. In time every void that we've had we've put a new requirement on those colleges, and now they're teaching many things that aren't even related to the disciplines anymore, everything from conflict management to AIDS education, to everything else. The fact of the matter is if colleges really did nothing more than ensure the content background of the teachers for what they were going to teach we would be so far ahead of the game.

I'm not going to go through this in detail, but I do want to point out a couple of things. First, just how crowded, absolutely crowded the college curriculum is, the second thing is how duplicative the inservice system is, and the third of course is this huge disconnect in between the two, where no system exists for those teachers at all. So there is no sort of system differentiation here, everybody is trying to do everything.

[See Slide 2] Here, I want to suggest a new system. If, in fact, in the pre-service education, the focus really was on not exclusively, but on content, and if in the first two years of teaching, when instructional issues really become paramount, if the system focused on helping teachers to teach, and then you had the rest of the inservice system to kick in and actually then take these teachers from novice practice to more sophisticated practice, and sort of deeper issues of teaching and learning. Then you would have a sort of differentiated system. And sort of bring back that one point that I made, if in that induction period what you were really doing was introducing that teacher to a community of practice, they would then follow through with them the rest of their careers, then they would have sort of this ongoing support system they would need for the whole time.

This isn't, by the way, very much different from the medical profession, right? It's called residencies, you do your residencies. And one very important other point I wanted to make, we made this mistake, I think everybody is making this mistake by defining the goal of these induction programs as retention. That isn't the goal. The goal of these programs, I really firmly believe, has to be successful teachers. It turns out if the goal is success and effectiveness, then what happens is retention takes care of itself, because people who are successful early then stay and do what they are successful at. And I think we make this mistake. And, again, sort of the medical analogy, the purpose of residency programs isn't to save doctors, it isn't to keep doctors in the profession, it's actually to make them better doctors. It's to continue their learning. And I think that has to be the purpose of induction programs is to make good teachers, to continue their learning, and just like doctors, to go ahead and induct them into their specialty, whether it's the college of obstetricians and gynecologists, or cardiologists, or whatever else, what about the college of exemplary science teaching and learning.

Just a couple of other points, or claims I want to throw out that I can't elaborate on, but we can talk about in the breakout discussion. The next point is that, in fact, I think this work doesn't have to happen necessarily at colleges and universities, and local education agencies. If we're talking about disciplined based communities, I think there's a whole host of professional organizations, discipline based organizations I see that Bruce Alberts is here, as well as informal science institutions across this country that could really take on this work. And have been effectively, by law and by resource, locked out of the market up to this point, except in rare instances like our own.

We have 250 informal science education institutions across this country, devoted to science, mathematics and technology. And it turns out that we've learned that almost half of the in science inservices that elementary school teachers receive, they actually get from an informal science center. So I want to kind of point that out, the wonderful resource that you have there. And I think they represent what I would call the third institution, the best of a third institution that can serve these beginning teachers, and two central elements of a third institution are this. One, that they ought to be discipline based, or have some sort of connection or tradition with the disciplines, whether it be history or science or mathematics. And, second, that they have a deep pool of veteran teachers that can really serve as the coaches and mentors for those new teachers.

There's two other points, because I know I am running out of time. The first one is that the time for smart designs is now, because everybody is pouring their dollars into them. And we have discovered -- and Maria Santos is here; I know she's exemplary; she's sort of the exception that proves the rule in San Francisco unified school district where in the beginning teacher program they actually give it over to the curriculum instruction people. In California I know many programs have been given just to any district administrator who has any time to administer another program, whether they're special ed, or transportation, or whatever it might be, because there is no guidance or mandates, or resources coming from the state. So I think if we really invest in these programs now, we can really shape and influence them, because we're building them from the ground up, rather than trying to change existing institutions.

And finally, these programs, I don't want to fool anybody, are extremely expensive. In most cases they run about $8000 per teacher, per year. The reason they're so expensive is because the difference between quality and less quality programs is having the mentor teachers, the coaches, fully released from their classroom duties to work with the novice teachers, and that's key. You have to work in the classrooms with those teachers, you have to work in the schools to help them. And David Haselkorn, in his paper, he said, well, I can't venture how much that would cost. I'm going to take a huge risk here and suggest a simple equation, $8000 per teacher, roughly 200,000 new teachers a year across the United States, and so to really do the job I think it would cost about $1.6 billion a year to create this new third institution.

Thank you.

This page last modified April 24, 2000 (gkp)