Tom Carroll, president of the Washington-based National Commission on Teaching and America's Future, said his staff has concluded in a memo that schools with mostly poor students need "well structured, mentored induction that ends sink-or-swim induction of new teachers. Inexperienced teachers are too often given the most challenging classrooms of students in the toughest schools. Their induction into the teaching profession is often a hazing ritual."
"As a result," the commission staff memo said, "the typical low income school has high teacher turnover, the highest percentage of inexperienced and uncertified teachers and the fewest accomplished teachers in the district. The teacher dropout rate in low income schools is often higher than the student dropout rate."
Some of the debate over preparing teachers for low-income environments centers on Teach for America, a nonprofit group that since 1990 has sent more than 12,000 recent college graduates with no more than a summer of training into classrooms in low-income areas. The program is popular in some financially strapped school systems because the recruits are bright and enthusiastic, and because those systems can't find enough credentialed teachers to fill their classrooms. Teach for America corp members rarely have full credentials.
A recent study showed that students with credentialed teachers did better than students with noncredentialed teachers, whether or not the educators were in Teach for America, leading critics to question the program's effectiveness. Teach for America says that more than half of its alumni, who sign up for two years, are still working in education and that 34 percent are teachers. Some former members, the organization says, have created inner-city schools, such as the 38 schools of the Knowledge Is Power Program.
Administrators at UMBC point to Berlin as an example of what can be done if a young educator is given a chance to get into the classroom early and build her skills.
Berlin graduated from Oakland Mills High School in Columbia. The UMBC program first placed her with 3-year-olds at the Catonsville Presbyterian Family Child Care Center, where she observed the teacher and students.
This initial observation period is important in preparing future teachers for classes in which they will have to deal with a wide range of abilities and learning styles, UMBC educators say. Students visit the same classroom once a week, three hours at a time, for at least 15 weeks and then write a report that is often 50 or 60 pages long.
"From the very beginning, we are trying to help our students develop a critical eye," Lee said. They note, among other things, how the young students are grouped, which students are not paying attention, which are creating disturbances and how the teacher handles that.
Berlin's next assignment as an undergraduate was in a special education pre-kindergarten class at Edmondson Heights Elementary School in Baltimore County. That experience, she said, "truly solidified my desire to teach special-ed."
When asked what she thinks about teaching learning-disabled children in an urban neighborhood, Berlin said, the words sound strange to her. "I know it sounds like a cliche," she said, "but I truly don't think about that very often. I figure that every population has issues that go with it, and I love the challenge that this population brings."
