School Leader

North Carolina established the North Carolina Teaching Fellows Program in 1986 to recruit teacher candidates into public colleges. Due to budgetary concerns, the program in no longer in effect; however, lessons can still be learned from the program structure.The state paid students to attend a public university if they agreed to spend at least four years teaching in a public school after graduation. According to a recent report on the program, 60 percent of the fellows who started teaching 20 years ago still work in public schools today.

The Arkansas Partnership for Teacher Quality—a consortium involving Arkansas educator preparation programs—the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education, and the National Education Association conduct a periodic survey of graduates of the state’s educator preparation programs within their first five years of program completion. The survey is a rich source of data on teachers’ postgraduate teaching experience and their views of how well their preparation programs prepared them for teaching careers. 

This nontraditional program specifically trains school principals to become more effective leaders in high-need urban schools. New Leaders blends significant on-the-job training with coursework and mentoring from local educators. It includes a full year-long paid residency, with graduates placed in administrative positions in partner districts or charter schools and one more year of on-the-job professional development.

The UTeach Institute was originally founded at the University of Texas–Austin to provide a high-quality teacher preparation route for top science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) students. Now a national program replicated on numerous campuses, UTeach is a specific response to the need for increasing the number of STEM teachers in the pipeline.

This study examined population data on teachers and schools in Illinois to determine changes in the level of teacher qualifications across schools from 2001 to 2006. Researchers found that Chicago schools, especially those serving the highest percentages of students from low-income and minority families, experienced improvements in teacher qualifications; however, the results were more mixed in other Illinois districts.

Using a rich data set from North Carolina, the authors found that black seventh graders are far more likely to face a novice teacher in mathematics and English than are their white counterparts (the differences are about 54 percent in mathematics and 38 percent in English for the state as a whole). This inequitable access to experienced teachers occurs within districts, more so than between them.

Education Week reported the following: Although the data available online are on individual schools and districts and are not aggregated by state, the department’s own crunching of the numbers offered a glimpse of the extent of some educational inequities at the national level. Among the findings: “At schools where the majority of students were African-American, teachers were twice as likely to have only one or two years of experience compared with schools within the same district that had a majority-white student body.”

Although the Center on Great Teachers and Leaders does not necessarily endorse the point of view expressed in this presentation (by The Education Trust) and the conclusions drawn from the data, it is a good example of advocacy for equity work using data. 

Annually, teachers in Chicago are presented with the Golden Apple teaching awards during a black-tie event. The Golden Apple organization and the Chicago media team up to air the ceremony for the community. Although the content does not reflect purely issues of inequitable access, it provides an example of strategic ways to engage with the media to share education successes. 

In 2010, Charlotte-Mecklenburg (in North Carolina) prioritized the equitable access to effective teachers in the school district as a key objective in its overall goal of providing effective educators for all students. Specifically, the school district called for high-need schools to have teachers and administrators with the same experience and degrees for teachers in schools recognized as Schools of Excellence and Distinction.