How State Boards of Education Can Upgrade Math Teaching in the Elementary School

To consist of 40 items, it will be the first licensure test in the country to seriously assess the math knowledge of prospective elementary and special education teachers.It is based on the reasonable principle that these teachers-to-be should be expected to demonstrate, without the use of a calculator, a deep understanding of the math concepts that underpin what they will teach their students, also without the use of calculators.

The Board wants the test to have strong ripple effects through the state's education schools. Just to make sure, in January it proposed and sent out for public comment stronger math requirements for elementary and special education licensure programs than what are now in the regulations.

Why is the Massachusetts Board of Education making it harder to get an elementary or special education teaching license and expecting education schools to offer more demanding (and probably more) math courses? Like business leaders, professional organizations, and other state officials, as well as the general public, it knows that many teachers of elementary-age students struggle with math, and it fears they are passing on their limited math skills to their students. Students' scores on the state's elementary math test have not risen for several years, and not enough students achieve at the two highest performance levels, given the amount of money that has been spent on their teachers' professional development in mathematics.The Board is also confident that there will be no shortage of elementary and early childhood teachers; licensure programs in these fields in the Bay State (as in many other states) produce many more graduates than its public schools can employ. A more selective pool of newly licensed teachers will be to a school district's advantage.

In states in which they set the policies that govern teacher licensure, other boards of education can easily do what this one board of education is doing—using the chief quality control measure that other professions use for determining entry into the profession to upgrade future teachers' academic qualifications. State boards can do so for two reasons.First, it is their obligation to protect children from incompetent teachers, the main purpose of teacher licensure tests.S econd, the provisions in Title II of the Higher Education Act hold teachers' professional preparation programs accountable for their scores on these tests and allow each state to determine what tests to use and their cut scores. Boards of education have generally been very slow to exercise their responsibility for ensuring reasonably high pass scores on academically rigorous licensure tests. And that responsibility must be exercised more closely if we are to upgrade programs preparing teachers of mathematics. According to research studies, most teacher licensure tests are pitched at the high school level in terms of overall difficulty, and their cut scores are set so low that a passing score often means no more than middle school achievement.We would expect more from high school students who wanted to become teachers, never mind college graduates.

For example, in 1999, Education Trust published a report on the content of teacher licensure tests in English and mathematics. The panel of experts used in the study found most mathematics licensure tests dominated by "simple recall" in multiple-choice items. They judged secondary mathematics tests to be at the 10^th to 11^th grade level. They judged the tests required for elementary licensure "at about the tenth grade level."According to the report's authors, licensing tests fail to ask for a deep knowledge of the key concepts connected to the field of the license." Underlying the whole process," they believe, "is the assumption that teachers only need to know the content that is expected of their students, and maybe just a little bit more."

At best, most elementary licensure tests screen out only grossly incompetent candidates. Yet, on principle, new elementary teachers should come into their first teaching positions with enough discipline-based knowledge to enable them to teach the most advanced students they may encounter in the highest grades covered by their license. And, surely, special education teachers should begin their teaching careers with adequate mathematical knowledge to help students who are struggling with math. Few boards of education are aware that most licensure tests for special education teachers assess no subject matter knowledge at all. Addressing these teachers' deficiencies in mathematics through professional development is a Sisyphean task.Much higher academic expectations with a strong accountability measure should precede the entry of both elementary and special education teachers into the teaching profession.

The Massachusetts Board of Education is doing one more thing that other state boards can also do:It has asked the Commissioner of Education to gather information to help the Board evaluate the long-term effectiveness of a more academically rigorous math licensure test for teachers of elementary-age children. His staff have just sent a questionnaire to all the elementary education licensure programs in the state asking for (1) the number of mathematics courses now required for each of these programs, as well as copies of the syllabi and names of textbooks used in their mathematics courses, and (2) the number of mathematics methods courses now required in these programs, as well as copies of syllabi and names of textbooks used in these methods courses. In three to five years, the Board hopes to assess the effectiveness of its new policies to strengthen the math knowledge of prospective elementary and special education teachers by looking at the trends in the pass rates on this test. It will be able to do so by comparing information provided on the first questionnaire with information provided from a later questionnaire showing the extent to which the state's training programs increased the academic rigor of their required mathematics and mathematics methods courses.

A second reason that boards of education should request basic information on pre-service curricula is that we know almost nothing on a national basis about the content of the mathematics and mathematics methods courses that prospective teachers now take. There have been no studies similar to two recent studies on the syllabi used in reading methods courses across the country. These two studies, one by the National Council on Teacher Quality and the other by researchers at Boston University, found that aspiring elementary teachers are generally not taught to use the research-based reading instructional knowledge that underpins effective reading instruction in K to 3 and the Reading First Initiative in particular.

A third reason that boards of education should ask for baseline information on the pre-service curricula in their state's teacher training institutions is the absence of research evidence for"backloading" (teaching teachers needed subject matter knowledge after they have been licensed and started teaching) as opposed to "frontloading" (teaching aspiring teachers needed subject matter knowledge before they are licensed and have started teaching). Most elementary and special education teachers seem to require intensive and expensive professional development in mathematics today. But there are no studies showing that their understanding of mathematics has been increased more effectively after they began teaching, via professional development, than before they began teaching, via regular or specially designed mathematics courses.

Nor is there as yet clear and consistent evidence that an increase in teachers' mathematics knowledge through professional development leads to an increase in their students' achievement. As one example, the Massachusetts Department of Education found no relationship between teacher gains in mathematical knowledge and student gains in a two-year experimental study from 2000-2002 with 36 teachers in a dozen low-performing middle schools. Teachers gained from the math courses they took, but their students didn't. The Department concluded that increased teacher knowledge may not quickly or even necessarily lead to gains in student learning for extremely low-achieving middle school students.

On the other hand, the National Science Foundation released a report on January 29, 2007 on the results to date of its Math and Science Partnership Program.This brief report indicates student gains in the one table it provides. However, the report provides no information on the length of the programs it funded, what tests were used to assess students across the states participating in these partnerships, if there were control groups, what curricula were used in the schools and in the professional development programs, what tests were used to assess teacher gains, how much mathematical knowledge teachers of these students gained, what kind of knowledge, and what the relationships were between teacher gains and student gains. While most federal initiatives for professional development are now based on the assumption that increasing teachers' mathematics knowledge leads to greater gains in students' mathematics achievement, much may depend on the students' level of achievement in relation to their grade level and on the curriculum materials the teachers use (as we know from Reading First).And, whether or not these initiatives are effective as judged by statistically significant results, their costs are staggering.

To ensure implementation of the recommendations in the 1910 Flexner Report for reform of medical education in the United States, quality control took two forms: selective admissions (rare before the 1920s) and tougher state licensing exams. By 1935, 66 of the 160 medical schools in this country in 1904 had become first-class and have remained so.The other medical schools disappeared because their graduates could not pass these exams. As with the reform of medical education in the early 20^th century, rigorous exit requirements for teacher training programs may be among the most significant steps that could be taken to upgrade the academic qualifications of new elementary and special education teachers of mathematics.

The need for strong exit requirements for teachers was highlighted in a blue-ribbon panel report released by the Teaching Commission in 2004, chaired by Louis Gerstner, former Chief Executive Officer of IBM.One of the report's four recommendations was to strengthen current teacher tests by raising their passing scores and replacing "low-level basic competency tests with challenging exams that measure verbal ability and content knowledge at an appropriately high level. "This needs to be accompanied by profound changes in the training programs themselves, as outlined by Arthur Levine, former president of Teachers College, Columbia University, in his 2006 report Educating School Teachers. These changes should be based on a solid body of factual information, and most state boards of education are in exactly the right position to ask for the information that is needed.

For Further Reading:

Klein, D., Braams, B., Parker, T., Quirk, W., Schmid, W., and Wilson, W.S.(2005). The State of State Math Standards 2005.Washington, DC: Thomas B. Fordham Institute.

Levine, A.(2006).Educating School Teachers.Washington, DC: The Education Schools Project.

Mitchell, R. & Barth, P.(1999).How Teacher Licensing Tests Fall Short. Thinking K-16.Education Trust, Volume 3, Issue 1.

Rigden, D.(2006). Report on Licensure Alignment with the Essential Components of Effective Reading Instruction.Report commissioned by the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education.http://www.rften.org/content/Rigden_Report_9_7_06.pdf?PHPSESSID=8bad09b6a0936998ada5c4074c4394ad.

Steiner, D. with Rozen, S.(2004).Preparing tomorrow's teachers: An analysis of syllabi from a sample of America's schools of education.In F.M. Hess, A.J. Rotherham, & K.Walsh (Eds.).A qualified teacher in every classroom?Appraising old answers and new ideas.Cambridge: Harvard Education Press.

Stotsky, S.(2006).Why American students do not learn to read very well: The unintended consequences of Title II and teacher testing.http://www.tegr.org/Review/Articles/vol2/v2n2.pdf or http://www.thirdeducationgroup.org/Review/Articles/v2n1.htm

Stotsky, S.(2006).Who should be accountable for what beginning teachers need to know?Journal of Teacher Education, 57 (3), 256-258. http://JTE.sagepub.com/content/vol57/issue3.

The Teaching Commission.(2004). Teaching at Risk: A Call to Action. NY: CUNY Graduate Center, Manhattan,

Walsh, K., Glaser, D., & Wilcox, D.D.(2006).What Education Schools Aren't Teaching about Reading, and What Elementary Teachers Aren't Learning.Washington, DC: National Council on Teacher Quality.

Wang, A., Coleman, A., Coley, R., & Phelps, R. (2003).Preparing Teachers Around the World.Policy Information Report. NJ: Educational Testing Service.

Published March 19, 2007