By Ben Velderman
EAGnews.org

SACRAMENTO, Calif. – The presidential election is only days away, but StudentsFirst Founder Michelle Rhee is holding out hope that President Barack Obama and GOP nominee Mitt Romney might still offer specific details about how they would improve the quality of the nation’s teaching corps.

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Rhee considers improving teacher quality among the most essential of education reforms – next to increasing school choice and teacher accountability – but is concerned the subject isn’t being addressed by either side “at the level it needs to be.”

She also believes new teachers should be taught to analyze the results of standardized tests to determine student strengths and weaknesses.

Both candidates have discussed the importance of improving teacher performance in the nation’s classrooms, but have offered precious few details of how they’d make that happen.

President Barack Obama proposed a multi-billion dollar program earlier this year that would make teacher colleges more selective in choosing the next generation of educators, reports the Education News.

Gov. Mitt Romney wants to wants to eliminate unnecessary certification requirements that discourage talented individuals from pursing a teaching career.

Both men want to make a teaching career more appealing to top college graduates by raising teacher salaries.

Rhee thinks these policy prescriptions are too vague to offer much insight into the serious issue of strengthening the quality of the nation’s teaching corps.

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“We’re only getting the talking points instead of the specifics about what these policies would mean in practice,” Rhee tells EAGnews.org. “That’s the level of conversation that’s been missing.”

Teacher prep programs and data-driven instruction

Rhee believes that getting more effective teachers into the classroom must involve recruiting better candidates and providing them with better training at the university level.

Future teachers obviously need to be skilled in their content area and in classroom management practices, but it’s becoming increasingly important that they be able to read and analyze the data generated by standardized state tests.

Test results help educators identify which concepts students understand and the ones that require more work. It’s an approach known as data-driven instruction, and it’s fast becoming an essential teaching tool.

Rhee remembers a time early in her career when she helped interview teaching candidates for a charter school, and the issue of data-driven instruction came up.

“It was a very interesting experience,” she says. “We were interviewing a woman who had graduated from one of the most highly regarded teacher prep programs in the nation, and I asked her if she had been successful as a student teacher.”

The candidate said she had been successful and offered anecdotes about her positive interactions with students. When Rhee asked if she could point to any data that confirmed her success in reaching students, the woman was unable to answer.

“It was obvious she had no idea what I was talking about,” Rhee says.

It turns out that’s not a unique problem. Many teachers-to-be are leaving college with little or no understanding of the terminology used in reports of test results – much less how to analyze the data to determine which concepts students understand and which ones they don’t.

Ideally, teachers would use that information when crafting their lesson plans and making one of the nearly 11,000 significant instructional decisions the average teacher makes over the course of a school year, according to a recent report from the National Council on Teacher Quality.

Some wonder if the reason teacher prep programs don’t promote those skills is because it would validate standardized tests, which many in the education establishment believe are the scourge of their profession.

Rhee refuses to speculate about the reasons why teacher colleges aren’t training novice teachers in the ways of standardized testing, other than to say it would require universities to adjust the curriculum and course offerings.

“It would require people to change, and change is hard in any sector,” Rhee offers.

If improving teacher prep programs can help produce tomorrow’s quality teachers, what can be done to help today’s teachers improve their effectiveness?

For Rhee, the answer lies in teacher evaluations.

“We’re not giving teachers a lot of information” about how they’re performing in the classroom, Rhee says.

When good teachers are provided with clear expectations and substantive feedback about their classroom performance, they use that information to get even better. Persistently low-performing educators, on the other hand, can use the feedback as evidence that they need to find a new career, she says.

Since teacher evaluations are primarily a state- and school district-level decision, the quest for improving teacher quality won’t end with next week’s presidential election.

Rhee notes that “a lot of responsibilities fall on the school districts themselves.”

So while most Americans will focus on who wins the presidency, savvy education reformers and power-hungry teacher union leaders know that the local school board races will have more of an immediate impact on the quality of their local school.