Teacher-Quality Coalition Issues Policy Roadmap for Teacher, Principal Development
Recognizing the fact that students in many high-need schools continue to have disproportionately low access to great educators, on Tuesday the Coalition for Teaching Quality (CTQ) released Excellent Educators for Each and Every Child: A Policy Roadmap for Transforming the Teaching and Principal Professions. The Coalition also held House and Senate briefings on Capitol Hill with practitioners to help explain the importance of these strategies to address the inequity of opportunity.
In the policy roadmap, CTQ—which comprises more than 100 civil rights, disability, rural, youth, higher education, principal, and education advocacy organizations, including AACTE, dedicated to ensuring that every child has fully prepared and effective educators—presents a vision for a continuum of the teaching and principal professions to ensure every child has well-prepared and effective educators.
“The trademark of any profession is a continuum of expert learning and accomplishment,” said AACTE President/CEO Sharon P. Robinson. She said the roadmap “will ensure that our new teachers are “profession ready” on Day 1 with a clear path toward expanded roles and leadership.”
The policy roadmap outlines several measures to build a professional continuum that supports educator excellence: strengthen the recruitment pipeline for teachers and principals, build robust preparation programs that ensure that all educators are “profession ready,” and cultivate opportunities for continuous growth and leadership.
The following panelists spoke at the congressional briefings, moderated by Virginia Edwards of Editorial Projects in Education:
- Janel George, Education Policy Counsel, NAACP Legal Defense Fund
- Rachelle Moore, First Grade Teacher and Seattle Teacher Residency Mentor, Madorna K-8 School, Seattle, Washington
- Kristen Le, Kindergarten Teacher, Van Asselt Elementary School, Seattle, Washington, and 2013 Seattle Teacher Resident under the guidance of Rachelle Moore
- Everett Davis, Principal, Redland Middle School in Rockville, Maryland
- Melissa Stinnett, Associate Professor of Reading, Western Illinois University
In tandem with yesterday”s events, CTQ also released Profession-Ready Teachers and Principals for Each and Every Child, the first report in a series of deeper looks at pieces of the policy roadmap. This report describes four steps that future teachers must take to ensure that they are fully prepared when they enter the classroom as a teacher of record, including participating in extensive clinical experiences and demonstrating their skills and knowledge through a performance assessment.
For principals, “profession ready” means having a strong instructional background as a teacher, demonstrated abilities related to effective school leadership competencies, and prior success in leading adults. As such, the report says, profession-ready principals should earn an advanced degree and demonstrate a record of success as a teacher, complete a 1-year residency program under accomplished school leaders, and successfully demonstrate leadership competencies through assessments prior to and upon completion of their preparation and residency experiences.
Tags: AACTE in the community, AACTE partner organizations, clinical preparation, events, federal issues, school-university partnerships
