Teach For America Research Articles

The Performance Assessment System: A Portfolio Assessment Model for Evaluating Beginning Teachers

The Performance Assessment System (PAS) is a portfolio assessment mechanism used to evaluate beginning teacher performance as a function of the teacher’s approach and effectiveness at increasing student learning and growth. The PAS was originally developed by Teach For America, the national teacher corps, as an internal assessment tool for its teachers. The PAS has evolved in response to input from participants, administrators, and external evaluations over the course of four pilot implementations. Specifically, developers have streamlined requirements, focused efforts to incorporate measures of student performance, and clarified scoring rubrics. The PAS continues to be piloted as an assessment resource that eventually will help districts to retain only beginning teachers who are effective in the classroom and will empower states to license only teachers whose performance meets approved standards.

FOREIGN LANGUAGE POLICY: AN AGENDA FOR CHANGE. Richard D. Lambert (Ed.). The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science , 532 (March 1994). Special Issue. Pp. 249. $14.00 paper.

This collection of 15 papers includes two that also appear in Lambert (1994). Lambert has included significant perspectives on language teaching in America, with papers reflecting elementary and secondary education as well as adult needs and language-maintenance efforts. Presenting an excellent, inclusive set of concerns, this issue of Annals deserves special attention.

Teaching as a Gendered Experience

In this article, I explore teaching as a gendered experience. I first reflect on the history of teaching and the circumstances surrounding the entry of females into teaching; I then discuss the gendered experience--the absence of voice, choice of teaching as a career, lack of autonomy and control, low status and salary, blurring of boundaries of home and school, teacher isolation, evaluation, and career advancement. Finally, I suggest some ideas for female teacher empowerment. An Historical Look The feminization of teaching in America began during the Industrial Era, from the late 1700s until about 1860. Grumet (1988) describes the Industrial Era as a time when capital and I labor shifted from agriculture to industry. Wages of skilled laborers and managerial employees increased more rapidly than those of unskilled workers. A highly differentiated, sharper class system began to emerge. The common school emerged, a school favoring culture homogenization and creating the work ethos to equip children to compete for the new wealth of the industrial society (Grumet, 1988). Men left homes--no longer centers of economic productivity--to go to places of work; children left homes to attend common schools where they learned the rules, laws, language, and the order of their fathers, the principal, and the employer. Some women sought employment in the common schools. Underpaid, unmarried, and ill-prepared for the chaos and harsh discipline of urban schools and the isolation of rural schools, young women sought those jobs. Teaching welcomed women at this time. Society expected them to work without complaint for little pay while teaching, disciplining, supervising lunches, bandaging cuts, and being constantly on duty. Tyack and Hansot (1990) indicate that as far back as colonial times, teaching welcomed women because they accepted less pay than men. Norton (1926) reports that in the 1820s, male teachers' average salary was $15.44 per month (including board); female teachers' was $5.38. Walsh (1995) notes: They were a captive labor force, politically powerless, without opportunities for work in other fields, without suffrage, without even the right to own property (p. 48). Women were not prepared for the patriarchal systems of the schools. The nurturing aspect of mothering was separate from the business of teaching. Both the historical traditions of schooling and the traditions of ethical discourse have despised the family, defining the standards for public conduct and the political action in terms explicitly designed to oppose the relations, expectations, promise, and constraints of intimacy (Grumet, 1988, p. 168). Control was key to teachers' survival; principals expected teachers to control students and accept control by superiors. In 1867, visitors to Boston's Emerson School noted its exemplary order: Every pupil appears to be in anxious waiting for the word of the teacher, and when issued it is promptly obeyed by the class. The movements and utterances of the class are as nearly simultaneous and similar as they can be (Tyack, 1974, p. 54). Women teachers during this time were encouraged to exhibit passivity and self-abnegation. Bennett (1971) quotes from the 1795 Strictures on Female Education, which noted: Their virtues, exercised in solitude and springing purely from the heart, make no noise, and court no observation. Lavished chiefly on their children and their friends, they blaze not on the world, nor are they thought of dignity or consequence enough to embellish the recording page... Many are the statesmen they have raised by their secret magic, into fame; and whenever they are tempted to repine at the appearance of weakness and inferiority it becomes them to remember that their greatest strength lies in their `weakness,' their commands in their tears (pp. 99-100). Many teachers did not work well under these conditions and fled teaching. A few operated well in this rigid, ordered, objective world; some had gone into teaching to escape the closed, physical, limited lives of herded domesticity (Lawrence, 1915). …

ASTA Solo Competitions: Solid Proof of Higher Levels of Performance and Teaching in America

ASTA Solo Competitions: Solid Proof of Higher Levels of Performance and Teaching in America

Longitudinal form and the human conceptus.

Human rights are not a privilege conferred by the government They are every human being's entitlement by virtue of his humanity. The right to life does not depend, and must not be declared to be contingent, on the pleasure of anyone else, not even a parent or sovereign … I have no new teaching for America. I seek only to recall you to faithfulness to what you once taught the world Your nation was founded on the proposition — very old as a moral precept, but startling and innovative as political insight — that human life is a gift of immeasurable worth, and that it deserves, always and everywhere, to be treated with the utmost dignity and respect — Mother Theresa of Calcutta (1994) 1

Everything Old Is New Again: Social History, The National History Standards and the Crisis in the Teaching of High School American History

The teaching of history seems to be in crisis. At secondary level debate has been engaged over what America's youth should be learning about our nation's past; as controversy over National Standards for United States History is played out on editorial page, television talk shows and in Senate chamber, role of teacher, student, and course content is very much up for grabs. But one thing is certain: everyone has an opinion even if few of participants in debate have actually read Standards or are teaching in America's high schools. My comments are based upon teaching at an elite private school for last thirteen years, after having taught at a state university for previous five. This debate commenced last fall with publication of National Standards for United States History and World History, but storm warnings echoed years earlier with report of Bradley Commission and other joint-sponsored reports on Social Studies in Schools. Issues related to pedagogy have been even more pressing as secondary school teachers are flooded with material about student-centered classroom and new delivery systems preparing students for twenty-first century, as if very mission of profession of teaching is as committed to reformatting as new versions of computer software that appear every month. Workshop leaders talk about teacher becoming guide on side rather than pilot flying plane, as though academic teachers were engaged in an athletic activity that relegated teacher to status of a coach sitting on bench while team moved ball up field. We learn that students learn best facing one another, so that it is important to replace antiquated desks with seminar tables or to move those armchair desks into the circle. We are told that everyone has a different learning style: some students are passive learners and some are active learners-and, of course, there is a gender dimension to learning that must be taken into consideration as well. We are asked to provide more inclusive, more relevant, more selfSreferential material to enhance students' self-esteem and to educate students for coming century. Some teachers say that the box is already so filled that only way we can do that is by lengthening school year as well as school day. And we must not forget that two-parent working family requires a longer school day and year to provide child care that homemaker used to offer. All of which leads to school's becoming a surrogate parent as teachers are exhorted more and more to provide ethical guidance that doomsayers tell us is no longer coming from home. We are told that we should teach students how tO think and not what to think, and so it really does not matter if a teacher lacks expertise to teach a subject because enthusiasm and pedagogy are more important than content.

Teach for America

Teach for America

Research in Music Teacher Education

tion as a means of improving instruction, its delivery, and its evaluation. This viewpoint, however, must be challenged if the music education profession is to make significant improvements in the quality of teaching in America's music classrooms and rehearsal halls. Moreover, this position must be revised if research is to be viewed positively by both preparatory and practicing music educators. A positive view of research would facilitate necessary and desirable curricular and methodological modifications to school music programs. Music teacher education programs must include an early introduction to systematic inquiry and consistent reinforcement and use of research concepts. Additionally, the important research being done in traditionally academic educational settings, such as studies focusing on cooperative learning and effective schools, must not be minimized or-even worse-discredited as

The Politics of Curriculum Decision-Making: Issues in Centralizing the Curriculum

ple, a PBS special on Teach for America (TFA), a Today Show expos6 of an innercity school, and a book on school reform by Edward Fiske, former education editor of the New York Times. These afforded sharply focused, if superficial, images of the worst and best of American schools, an interesting backdrop for Klein's scholarly (and appropriately fuzzier) portrayal of curriculum politics and the condition of schools.

Teachers, Preachers, and Feminists in America: Women Rabbis

2 SHOFAR TEACHERS, PREACHERS, AND FEMINISTS IN AMERICA: WOMEN RABBIS Rita J. Simon and Pamela Nadell Rita J. Simon, University Professor of Justice, Law, and Society, American University, received her Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Chicago in 1957. She has authored works on immigration , women and crime, the jury system, and transracial adoption . Her most recent book is Women's Movements in America: Their Successes, Disappointment and Aspirations (with Gloria Danziger) (Praeger, 1991). Pamela S. Nadell, Associate Professor of Jewish Studies and History , American University, earned her Ph.D. in History from the Ohio State Universtiy in 1982. She is the author of Conservative Judaism in America: A Biographical Dictionary and Sourcebook (Greenwood Press, 1988). In 1972 Sally Preisand, the first woman rabbi, was ordained in the United States. She was a graduate of Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, Ohio. As of today, there are close to 200 women rabbis who have been ordained by the Reform, Reconstructionist, and Conservative movements. This article describes the findings we have obtained thus far in our study ofwomen in the rabbinate. The larger study compares the motivations, performances, and experiences of women in the rabbinate as opposed to women in various Protestant ministries and as opposed to men in the rabbinate and the ministry . The larger study also has a historical component. In it, we explore the changing patterns of women's participation in the American synagogue. We consider first how middle-class Jewish women in synagogue sisterhoods and congregational schools brought their traditional private nurturing skills to bear on the public setting. Then we discern how, over the course of the twentieth century, women in the largest American Jewish denominations both gained access to lay leadership (outside the sisterhoods) and won, or were given, opportunities for enhanced ritual participation. These striking changes in the status and public roles of synagogue women paved the way for what became the capstone marking Jewish women's religious emancipation, the ordination ofwomen as rabbis. Volume 10, No.1 Fall1991 3 The larger study also explores the stances that organized synagogue women have taken on the issue of female ordination. It examines the ways concomitant European developments, especially in England and Germany, might have affected the American movement for the ordination of women rabbis, and the connections between the woman's movement in the United States and the movement for ordination. As part of this history, we trace the careers of women who tried to become rabbis before 1972 and all the institutional and cultural barriers they encountered. We also view the careers of those few women who, in fact, lead congregations without benefit of ordination . The data reported in this article are based on 35 in-depth personal interviews with women rabbis in different parts of the country who have been ordained since 1976. Each interview has three major sections. The first part asks the respondent to tell her story: why and how she chose to become a rabbi. In the course of the narrative she describes when she decided to become a rabbi, the persons who helped her make that decision, who had the strongest influence on her arriving at that decision, and the steps she took to pursue her choice of profession. The narrative includes her personal background and family environment with particular emphasis on her early Jewish education and experience; parents' occupations; siblings' age, sex, and occupations ; and marital status.. The second part focuses on her training for the rabbinate and on positions she has held since ordination. For each position she describes the institution with which she was associated, her title or position, her major responsibilities , salary, how she obtained the position, and her reactions to the experience. The third section provides the respondent with an opportunity to explain how she performs and interprets her role as a rabbi. For example, how she officiates at such rites of passage ceremonies as bar and bat mitzvahs, weddings, funerals, and baby namings. What kinds of issues and topics does she usually discuss in her sermons? How does she relate to various groups (youngsters, the elderly, the members of the Board, etc.) of her congregation ? This section also has a comparative focus...

The Proficiency Movement: Where Do We Go from Here?

The proficiency movement in second language teaching has had a wide impact because it represents not only an attempt to introduce a national metric but also an attempt to modify the nature of the second language curriculum. The curriculum has been pointed in the direction of instruction in the functional use of language. The list of languages affected by the proficiency movement includes both commonly and less commonly taught languages. This paper suggests that the impact of the proficiency movement will be more difficult to attain in Russian language teaching because the field has not yet moved far enough from the traditional grammar-translation approach. It is noted that the organization of language teaching in America mitigates against the acquisition of usable skills by imposing severe limitations on time allotted to the study of foreign languages as well as by adopting a non-use orientation. A brief history of the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) generic guidelines is presented, followed by a description of the Russian proficiency guidelines and a review of proficiency testing. Proficiency is further discussed in terms of the four skills (listening, reading, writing, speaking) an proficiency-based textbooks. Suggestions for improving the instructional system are offered. Contains 18 references. (LB) ********************************************************************** Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made from the original document. ***********************************************************************

Dollars and Dreams: Classrooms as Fictitious Message Systems, 1790-1930

Contemporary Americans are experiencing an orgy of anxiety over material matters. There are books announcing the imminent demise of American economic supremacy in the world. There are prophets of doom announcing that material resources are dwindling and/or being appropriated by foreign nationals seeking to dominate our land. There is a national lament over the quality of work being done in the nation's manufactories, and there is a sense of moral outrage over the work habits of American laborers. There is high distress over the intellectual qualities of the nation's youth, and there is an outpouring of reports calling America's teachers to task. The calls for educational reform are not calls for justice or equality, but for technological productivity, military superiority, economic dominance, and cultural supremacy. Ironically, the reports call on schools to enhance the economic position of the United States, while urging a retreat from vocational emphases in the schools. Many calls for reform advocate new alliances among industry, government, and public schools, but champion a return to a traditional core curriculum or the imposition of national examinations as a solution.

Who Were America's Teachers?: Toward a Social History and a Data Archive

(1989). Who Were America's Teachers?: Toward a Social History and a Data Archive. Historical Methods: A Journal of Quantitative and Interdisciplinary History: Vol. 22, No. 2, pp. 68-73.

What do we know about who is teaching America's teachers?

What do we know about who is teaching America's teachers?

Book Reviews : Models for the Preparation of America's Teachers Donald R. Cruickshank Phi Delta Kappa Educational Foundation Bloomington, Indiana, 1985 112 pp

Book Reviews : Models for the Preparation of America's Teachers Donald R. Cruickshank Phi Delta Kappa Educational Foundation Bloomington, Indiana, 1985 112 pp

A Report on the Present Status of Undergraduate Urologic Teaching in Medical Schools and Some Resulting Recommendations

At the request of the Education Council of the American Urological Association a survey of urologic teaching in America’s medical schools was done. The most startling and distressing finding, based upon the study of 99 medical schools, was that more than half (52 per cent) of the schools do not require any clinical exposure to urology before graduation. Suggestions are offered, based upon the documented importance of urology in the delivery of primary care, for an approach to medical school curriculum committees to mandate the return of urology as a required subject in our schools.

A Survey of Old English Teaching in America in 1966

A Survey of Old English Teaching in America in 1966

Style of Teaching and Teacher Evaluation

Demonstration Centers supported by the U.S. Office of Education, not one made any systematic study of instructional behavior supposedly generated by the curriculum content that they fabricated a priori. Even when it was claimed that the material was tried out in numerous classrooms, what went on in those class rooms was never reported, and hence a golden opportunity, one probably never to come again for years, was simply lost forever-no videotapes to analyze, no shorthand recording for later content analysis, no audio-taping to be studied for recurring patterns or range of cognition. Although millions of dollars have been spent on English, to make instruction better or learning deeper, we still have no idea what English teaching in America is actually like, when all we needed to do was to look at it or let teachers look

Teaching Second Language Reading at the Advanced Level: Goals, Techniques, and Procedures

The oral approach to teaching ESL rightly emphasizes oral skills at the beginning and intermediate levels, yet reading fluency, which cannot be achieved by simple transfer of oral skills, is much more important in the long run for most adult students in technical and academic programs. Directed to the classroom teacher, this paper focuses on three primary aspects of the teaching task at the advanced level: (1) definition of reading skill goals; (2) techniques for reading skill improvement; (3) classroom procedures. The student's general goal-getting information from the printed page efficiently, rapidly, and with full understanding-requires development in five skill areas: reading speed, vocabulary recognition, and comprehension of sentences, paragraphs, and complete reading selections. Techniques and exercises for improvement in each of the five areas are illustrated by examples compiled from ESL texts. Five types of questions for comprehension are described and ranked. Vocabulary improvement by means of word analysis and through use of context clues to meaning is discussed and illustrated. Classroom procedures involve three stages: (1) pre-reading preparation to minimize linguistic interference and provide motivation and purpose, (2) actual reading, and (3) oral and written follow-up activities. 1.0 Introduction. 'Hearing before speaking, speaking before reading, reading before writing.' (Defense Language Institute, American Language Course: Intermediate Phase, Instructor Text, p. 1.) This prescription has dominated contemporary second language teaching in America at least since 1941, the year that marked the entrance of the United States into World War II and, with that, the end of our 'linguistic isolation', as Moulton remarks in his excellent survey of language teaching in the '40s and '50s (Moulton 1961, pp. 84-85). The armed forces soon found that the recently established ACLS Intensive Language Program could meet the need for teaching large numbers of military men a practical speaking knowledge of many languages, most of which were completely unfamiliar to any Americans including the nation's linguists. But the linguists were soon at work analyzing the languages and designing course materials guided by such linguistic principles as these-principles which became, as Moulton puts it, language teaching slogans of the day: 'Language is speech, not writing. A language is a set of habits. Teach the language, not about the language.' Thus it was that the 'oral approach'

Browsing Through the Bookshelves MARTIN HABERMAN, Review Editor : STINNETT, T. M. Turmoil in Teaching: A History of the Organizational Struggle for America's Teachers. New York: Mac millan, 1968. 406 pp. $7.95

Browsing Through the Bookshelves MARTIN HABERMAN, Review Editor : STINNETT, T. M. Turmoil in Teaching: A History of the Organizational Struggle for America's Teachers. New York: Mac millan, 1968. 406 pp. $7.95