An Urban Education

A new program targets the training needs of D.C.-area teachers.

By Jamie L. Freedman

The statistics are shocking. Seventy five percent of urban public school teachers call it quits within five years of launching their careers. Standardized test scores in urban school districts lag far behind those in suburban areas, as high numbers of students struggle to achieve literacy.

GW’s Graduate School of Education and Human Development’s Department of Teacher Preparation and Special Education is fighting to reverse these troubling trends in District of Columbia Public Schools. Armed with a five-year, multimillion dollar Teacher Quality Education Partnership grant from the U.S. Department of Education, GSEHD recently created “The Literacy Collaborative: Communities of Practice,” a consortium of public and private organizations dedicated to developing new and innovative strategies to recruit, train, support, and retain quality teachers for D.C. public schools. Nearly $10.5 million has been pledged by the Department of Education (46.8 percent) and consortium members (53.2 percent) to fund new and continuing teacher preparation and retention initiatives aimed at improving literacy rates among District schoolchildren.

“High attrition rates for teachers, high absentee rates for students, and low achievement are part and parcel of urban school systems,” says Jay R. Shotel, chair of GW’s Department of Teacher Preparation and Special Education and co-principal investigator of the project, along with GSEHD Director of Special Projects and Professor of Special Education Maxine Freund. “We believe we can make a difference. We’ve already made a significant difference at D.C.’s Cardozo High School, where we’ve trained 50 secondary and special education teachers through the Urban Initiative preservice program. Now, we’re eager to impact the entire system by training a cadre of committed teaching professionals specializing in literacy. It’s very exciting.”

Recruitment efforts are now underway for the program’s summer 2005 inaugural class of 21 teacher candidates, who will serve as full-time interns in seven elementary and middle schools in Southeast Washington and participate in a yearlong seminar focusing on literacy, issues of urban education, and the application of technology to urban schools. Rigorous coursework and special projects will round out the program, culminating in initial licensure and a master’s degree in the area of elementary education, special education, or secondary education (English). Candidates may also opt to pursue dual degree credentials, combining certification in elementary or secondary education with licensure in special education. Participants will receive significant scholarship support, as well as a $500 tax-free monthly stipend.

“The Teacher Quality Education Partnership, which created the Literacy Collaborative, is an excellent enhancement for the type of change I am pushing within DCPS,” says D.C. Public Schools Superintendent Clifford B. Janey. “We are working harder and smarter to recruit and retain highly qualified teachers for DCPS schools. This joint effort on the part of the collaborative comes at a time when we are introducing new and more rigorous academic standards for students, which brings with it new expectations for teachers. I look forward to the work of the collaborative helping us as we take achievement in DCPS to the next level.”

The grant will also provide advanced training for veteran D.C. public school teachers and administrators seeking to expand their critical literacy and instructional leadership skills. “We’ll provide professional development support for 40 existing D.C. teachers to become literary leaders and coaches in their schools over the five years of the partnership,” Shotel says. Through their efforts, combined with those of the 105 skilled, new teachers who emerge from the program, GW hopes to implement lasting change in the system.

“We see this as a tremendous opportunity to strengthen GW’s nationally recognized teacher education programs while ensuring additional high quality teacher candidates for the District of Columbia Public Schools,” says Shotel, who notes that the team already has received 150 inquiries for the program’s first 21 slots. “GW has a long tradition of recruiting talented arts and sciences majors and mid-career professionals to work in urban schools. Through this partnership, we will implement changes in teacher training, induction, and mentoring that we hope will become a model for the whole system.”

Janey says the grant’s dual emphasis on recruiting and training skilled teachers and supporting veteran teachers through professional development is the perfect recipe for success. “My experience and research indicate that the retention and continuous development of highly qualified teachers remains at the center of successful and sustainable school-based reform,” he says.

Consortium partners include GW’s Columbian School of Arts and Sciences, The State Education Agency of the District of Columbia, Community Preservation & Development Corp., National Institute for Urban Schools Improvement, Center for Health & Health Care in Schools, Aequus Technologies, The New Teacher Center, and In2Books. United by an interest in teacher quality, urban education, and curriculum development, advisory board members are active participants in the project, sharing their expertise to make substantial direct and indirect contributions to the Literacy Collaborative. “We are developing a community of practice, where experts from a number of fields connected to one another by a common sense of purpose come at the problem from different perspectives,” Shotel says.

The project builds on GW’s excellent track record of training skilled educators who remain in urban school systems. “Nationwide, the beginning teacher attrition rate in urban schools is approximately 75 percent over the first five years, compared to only 11 percent among GW graduates,” Shotel says. “Our attrition rate is low because GW-trained teachers are prepared well for what they will face in their jobs.”

According to Shotel, a vital key to teacher retention is the provision of strong support systems. “An exciting part of the project will be helping the District develop support systems in the new teacher induction process, as well as the mentoring process, and building a set of structures that make teachers feel that they’re appreciated and accomplishing something so that they want to stay.”

The grant’s focus on literacy is paramount, according to Freund. “First and foremost, our emphasis is on preparing our pre-service teachers to meet the challenges of supporting their students in acquiring literacy,” she says. Freund defines literacy in broad-based terms, encompassing the skill sets to be competent readers, writers, and users of technology and applying those skills across the disciplines. “By training 145 new and continuing teachers to model the best practices for improving literacy rates in their classrooms, we’re hoping to create a new generation of teachers for D.C. Public Schools.”

Freund is helping to blaze another vitally important trail in the education world through her work with the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards. She is currently completing a two-and-a-half year National Board-sponsored research study examining the importance of mentoring and support groups to teachers’ success in navigating the rigorous board certification process.

“We were given a sample of candidates seeking National Board certification across the country and examined the relationship between who was mentored and supported through the process and who achieved candidacy,” she says, noting that nearly 900 teachers participated in the study. Freund submitted her report to the National Board in April and presented her findings at the April meeting of the American Educational Research Association in Montreal. She also presented her work at the National Board meeting in Washington in July.

Another large-scale research initiative currently underway at the Graduate School of Education and Human Development seeks to measure the success of highly rated middle school science curriculum units with diverse student populations. A collaborative effort between GW’s school of education, the Department of Anthropology, and Montgomery County (Maryland) Public Schools, the five-year project is funded by a $5.2 million Interagency Education Research Initiative grant, administered through the National Science Foundation. GW research team members include Professor of Teacher Preparation and Special Education Sharon Lynch, Professor of Anthropology Joel Kuipers, and Associate Professor of Secondary Education Curtis Pyke.

“I’ve been interested in science education reform and equity issues for at least 10 years now,” Lynch says. “Despite the best intentions to increase equity and to close achievement gaps, the science education reform movement has failed to adequately respond to the diversity of the U.S. student population. We designed this research study to identify the conditions under which three carefully designed, high quality science curriculum units, aligned with reform goals, improve student learning of challenging science concepts on a large scale.”

Montgomery County Public Schools is a large, top-performing Maryland school district that is extremely diverse—culturally, linguistically, and socioeconomically. Composed of nearly 140,000 students from 163 different countries, MCPS has no ethnic majority. The research project, known as SCALE-UP, is implemented in two phases. During phase one, a student-centered, hands-on science unit is introduced to eighth graders in five middle MCPS middle schools, while students in five demographically matched comparison schools receive instruction guided by a menu of other approved curricular choices. In the scale-up phase of the study, the unit is progressively introduced at 15 more middle schools, followed by all 37 MCPS middle schools the following year. The project also includes an ethnographic component, with anthropologist Kuipers videotaping students to better understand their level of involvement and experiences as they move through the units. Upon the study’s completion in 2007, more than 200,000 students and 250 teachers will have participated.

Initial results are positive, reports Lynch. “Students exposed to the first new unit scored significantly higher on their assessment than those in the comparison group,” she states. “Most importantly, disaggregated data indicate that the intervention is improving outcomes for all demographic subgroups. That hardly ever happens in education, and by the time the grant is completed, we should have a much better idea about how this is occurring. Everyone wins, which is great news.”

back to top

© 2005 The George Washington University
The George Washington University is an equal opportunity/affirmative action institution.