Novice teachers trained under new program outperform veterans in some subjects

A new and rare study suggests that novice Louisiana teachers trained through an alternative program called The New Teacher Project on average outperformed experienced teachers in helping their students progress in math, reading and language arts.

Nearly all of the hundreds of Teach For America participants in Baton Rouge and New Orleans earn their teacher certification through a local variation of The New Teacher Project, a fast-track process called the Louisiana Practitioner Teacher Program.

Teach For America is a national program that places high-performing college graduates in low-income rural and urban schools for a minimum of two years. It has a particularly large presence in the New Orleans area, with about 350 members currently teaching.

In science, The New Teacher Project graduates performed about as well as the average experienced teacher, the study found. In social studies, experienced teachers outperformed the alternative program's graduates.

Gains for the alternative program's teachers were particularly large in math, while evidence they outperformed experienced teachers in language arts and reading was more modest.

The study, tracking student test performances in grades four through nine between 2004 and 2007, is unusual nationally because it focused on gains in test scores. By using a "value-added" analysis, researchers homed in on the amount of growth seen in individual students, no matter their starting point.

Researchers usually consider value-added analyses of student performance more telling than traditional rankings, which might compare a teacher whose students started two years behind, on average, to one whose students all started the year with grade-level marks.

The study team was led by Louisiana State University researcher George Noell, with the assistance of Jeanne Burns, associate commissioner for teacher education initiatives for the governor and state Board of Regents.

David Keeling, director of communications for The New Teacher Project, said the study shows that "New Orleans' strategy of engaging groups like our organization and Teach For America in the rebuilding of the school system is paying off."

Keeling conceded there "has been some skepticism about whether new, alternatively certified teachers could measure up. These results suggest that they can, if they are carefully selected and rigorously trained."

Room to improve

Some local educators point out, however, that value-added measurements of student growth can favor programs like Teach For America, where participants tend to work with students who are far behind grade level and, consequently, more likely to show rapid change.

"If you are working with very low-performing kids, it's easier to show value-added growth, " said Brian Riedlinger, outgoing chief executive officer of the Algiers Charter School Association.

He described the study as well-designed and applauded the state for using a value-added form of measurement, but said it's difficult to make "broad, general statements" about the quality of different groups of teachers based on the results.

But Burns said the study offers evidence that new, well-trained teachers can be more effective when compared with experienced teachers. The results challenge some teacher performance studies that have drawn opposite conclusions, she said.

Leslie Jacobs, a former state education board member who runs the nonprofit advocacy group Educate Now, says the study refutes critics who argue that it's unfair to give needy students an untried teacher through Teach For America.

"The student who gets that teacher for two to three years is not getting shortchanged, " she said.

However, Andre Perry, chief executive officer of the Capital One-UNO Charter School Network, said New Orleans schools are relying too heavily on programs that recruit young teachers from across the country.

The problem with the current strategy is "not necessarily effectiveness, but sustainability, " Perry said. He said it wastes money to repeatedly train new cycles of teachers from out of state instead of investing in local talent far more likely to settle here. "My argument is: Who should we encourage to do it? Who should we expect to bring New Orleans out of its educational conundrum?"

He added, "I believe a good majority of the educators should come from the communities the schools are in."

Measuring effectiveness

Burns said that, on behalf of the Board of Regents, she has been working with Noell's research team during the past few years on a way to evaluate various teacher-preparation programs. The team releases annual reports with more data each year.

For the purposes of the study, new teachers -- including those in The New Teacher Project group -- are defined as those in their first or second year of teaching after completing an alternative teacher-preparation program. Experienced teachers are all other certified teachers who have taught in their area of certification for two or more years.

Other alternative teacher-preparation programs examined in the study had mixed results. On average, a master's program at the University of Louisiana at Monroe and Northwestern State University's Practitioner Preparation Program both performed well, while a non-master's program at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and the Practitioner Teacher Program at the Louisiana Resource Center for Educators, based in Baton Rouge, were less effective.

The New Teacher Project's local program has certified more than 800 teachers in Louisiana. Of those, most are Teach For America members.

The majority of teachers complete the program in 12 months while also starting to teach full time. Participants complete various performance-based projects and participate in a seminar series.

When the Louisiana Practitioner Teacher Program started in 2001, it was the first non-university provider of teacher certification in the state. The report did not attempt to explore other more intangible factors in teacher performance, such as how well teachers relate to students and their parents, or how well they handle classroom discipline -- skills that some educators say can be as important as test score gains.

It goes far beyond studies in many states, however, which may look only at how many teachers pass state licensing exams, for instance, to assess the quality of teacher-preparation programs.

Burns said she is working on a follow-up study that will try to shed light on why some teacher-preparation programs are more effective than others.

Officials say they do not plan to use the study results to shut down specific teacher-preparation programs, but to strengthen those that are struggling.