Newark teaching programs get national accreditation
Posted Monday, June 01, 2009 from The Star-Ledger
Newark teaching programs get national accreditation
by Brian Whitley/The Star-LedgerMonday June 01, 2009, 8:47 PM
KaleenaBerryman, administrator of the Abbott Leadership Institute, speaks tostudents. The Future Educators of America club at University HighSchool in Newark meets with the Urban Teacher Education Program atRutgers-Newark.NEWARK -- A national accrediting body recently stamped its seal ofapproval on the Urban Teacher Education Program, which preparesstudents at two colleges for work in the city's public schools.
The decision reflects significantly more than dotted i's and crossedt's by faculty and staff at Rutgers University, assisted by the NewJersey Institute for Technology. It culminates a painstaking four-yearprocess of self-reflection and re-tooling, one that has included anarrowed focus on schools in Newark's city limits and more ambitiouscommunity partnerships.
It's also a process that has played out similarlyat 10 other programs in New Jersey over the past five years. Across thestate, student teachers and their host institutions are being evaluatedin a more comprehensive, far more data-driven way -- at a time whenmany people are reinventing themselves for what is considered a muchmore stable field.
"That's new for us. It's new for everyone," said Alan Sadovnik,acting chair of the urban education department at Rutgers in Newark."We've been sharpening, honing, trying to figure out how we can bestensure that what we say we do is actually occurring."
To receive the blessing of the Teacher Education AccreditationCouncil, a program must first develop a paper explaining, among otherthings, claims about how it arms future teachers to succeed.
Once a matter of simply pointing out particular parts of thecurriculum, schools now must prove those claims with hard evidence.That evidence includes scores from bulked-up rubrics that evaluatecoursework and teaching students' performance in front of K-12 classes.
Student teachers from the Rutgers-NJIT program in Newark classroomsare rated six times, with the first five acting as "formative"assessments, just for feedback, and the last serving as the equivalentof a final exam.
Before the accreditation process spurred a new system, students weredeemed either "good," "improving," or "needs improvement," in broadcategories, said longtime evaluator Barbara Gross.
Now, evaluators grade students on 47 elements, with scores corresponding to a 1-5 scale.
"It's easy to sit in a classroom for an hour-and-a-half and get anoverall impression of what's going on," Gross said. "It's much morecomplex and important to sort out: What about this piece? What aboutthis piece?"
By collecting more written feedback, the program documentsconstructive criticism otherwise shared only in oral conferences, saidJim LiPuma, an NJIT professor who helped develop the new form. It alsoenabled the creation of a numerical "cut score," the minimum markteacher candidates must achieve to pass, he said.
The system resembles another form put together by a group of otherstate institutions that found themselves in the same accreditationboat. A change to the state education code in early 2004 mandatednational accreditation by July 2009. Eleven schools, including someprivate schools such as Princeton and Fairleigh Dickinson universities,took part in the review.
At Fairleigh Dickinson, the process revealed two areas of relativeweakness for prospective teachers: strategies for reaching studentswith learning disabilities, and those for working with very diversepopulations.
"The data has shown that we're not as strong in those areas," said Vickie Cohen, director of the School of Education.
Diversity is an especially important focus for the Rutgers and NJITstudents in Newark. Since 2007, Sadovnik said, the program has narrowedits focus to creating a pipeline of teachers into the district.Officials are working on developing a database, he said, that willtrack whether graduates stay in Newark, whether they achieve tenure andhow their students perform -- what Sadovnik regards as the ultimatebarometer of success.
In the meantime, a sharper focus is manifest in other ways,including the courting of home-grown talent. In April, high schoolstudents from the Future Educators Club at a Newark high school touredthe program.
The director of teacher education, Joelle Tutela, said she isworking on branding and marketing the program -- "really, it's abusiness" -- and hopes to partner with her high school alma mater, theNewark Academy, to help place student teachers. And Tutela headed up amarketing campaign with the punch line "Do you have what it takes?"
The increased use of data also nourishes the urban focus that hastaken shape during the same time as the accreditation review. A"disposition rubric," which gauges how prepared would-be teachers arefor the challenges of urban districts, has been refined andstandardized.
"Some people get all A's, but they just aren't good teachers,"Tutela said. "There's enough mediocre teachers. We want to createbetter teachers."Back to Articles
