A r c h i v e d  I n f o r m a t i o n

Thank you.

DR. SUSAN SCLAFANI: [See Slide 1] Good morning. I'm delighted to have an opportunity to speak with you this morning and to tell you what we've been able to do in the Houston Independent School District in terms of an alternative certification program. [See Slide 2] Just to give you a perspective as to why we needed to look at an option such as this, I just want you to know who we are as a school district. We have about 210,000 students. We are a majority-minority school district and our special populations include bilingual education, special education, and gifted and talented.

And one of the important factors is that we're a predominantly low socio-economic level school district. Seventy-three percent of our students qualify for free and reduced lunch. [See Slide 3] I also think it's important for you to know that our population has changed over the years and the need for teachers who are able to teach in a bilingual situation has increased dramatically over the last decade. Ten years ago, we were about 25 percent Hispanic. We are now 53 percent Hispanic, so the numbers have shifted dramatically.

[See Slide 4] In Texas, we have a major teacher shortage issue. Approximately 63,000 vacancies in '98-'99, and yet only 21,000 teachers were certified in the state of Texas in '97-'98 to meet that need. Of those, the vast majority are traditionally certified teachers who are university graduates, but it does include 2,700 alternative certification program graduates around the state. The state has been into alternative certifications for about 12 years, so there are programs run by universities, run by the regional education service centers, which are intermediate education organizations, as well as by school districts. In addition, about 7,000 people came into the state of Texas and changed from their original state certification to Texas certification.

Now our attrition rate, we've got about 13,400 teachers in Houston, and our attrition rate is somewhere between 1,000 and 1,500 a year. When we looked at '99-2000, we had about 1,400 vacancies. We brought in 247 alternative certification program interns to help meet that, but you can see why I say this is simply a partial solution to our teacher shortages.

[See Slide 5] Houston started alternative certification in Texas. In fact, we were the initiators of the concept and went to the state and asked for permission to do it. They later opened this option to many additional people.

Over the last 13 years, we have certified over 4,000 teachers and they're primarily recruited in the areas in which we have shortages. Mathematics and science is a major area, but so is bilingual education and English as a Second Language education because of our dramatic increase in Hispanic students, many of whom are coming not only from Mexico but from Central and South America where their schooling has been interrupted by the harsh conditions that they've been living under. Special education is another area where we, as other districts around the country, continue to need additional people, partly because it is a difficult area in which to teach. People do get burned out. They move into other areas that are perhaps easier to teach, and so we try and cycle them back through, but frankly it is an area for saints. I'll just put it that way. The kinds of multiply-impaired children that we have, and those with severe and profound disabilities, is very large because of the medical center in Houston and because the reputation for good special education programs, frankly, moves around the state and so people move in to take advantage of the programs that are available.

The other area is bilingual diagnosticians. As I mentioned, we do have a large special education population. Since so many of our students are non-English speakers, then we had to create a program that would certify bilingual people to become educational diagnosticians so they could determine what the needs of the students were. Our requirements are the same as the state's requirements -- a Bachelor's degree with a 2.5 overall GPA and 24 semester hours in the area of certification.

[See Slide 6] I think what I'd like to use the limited time to talk about basically are what the critical success factors have been as we have looked at this. First of all, the selection process is critical. We, under a previous superintendent, tried to grow our program very quickly to take up more of the vacancies that we had and we moved the program that had traditionally served about 250 interns to one that suddenly served 700 interns. What happened, as we discovered, was the rigorous selection procedure disappeared. We had, in fact, people who were monolingual Spanish speakers coming into the program. That works for their instruction in Spanish. It doesn't work at all for the English as a Second Language instruction that the teachers must also do, and so we did not have good role models for our children in English.

We discovered that the transcript analysis, which had been a very time-consuming process, suddenly had to gear up for 700 people and it was not done as carefully, and particularly for the foreign transcripts that had come to us. So from that we have learned, and we now only use accredited transcript analysis companies to do that analysis for us. And in addition to that, our Houston human resources department spends a lot of time on reference checks to make sure that this is the kind of person we want teaching children. The grades may look wonderful, the paper record may look terrific, but is this a good role model for children? That is one of our critical issues.

We use something called the Gallup Urban Teacher Perceiver that looks at qualities that people need to have to work with urban children who are predominantly children of color and children of very limited economic means. We want commitment and understanding of those children in the people that we're hiring. The second thing is high quality course work. We do have approximately 15 months to work with our interns and what we discovered was when we allowed the students to go to any university in the city to do their course work that the variety and disparity and quality across those courses was tremendous.

So we went to an RFP process and said to one of the universities in the area, this is what we expect out of the course work that our students do. Please respond to this proposal if you believe that you can do it and you can do it for all of our interns. And we focused on, based on not only the input of our former students, interns who had gone to those universities, but also on the presentation. On the University of St. Thomas, they have agreed to work at a much reduced tuition level so that our students can afford it, but the quality is absolutely superb, and they work closely with our teachers and with our professional development department to ensure that what is happening for our teachers is of high quality.

We also have summer preparation seminars that we do with them to talk about teaching in an urban district. They go into our summer school classes to observe, come back, and debrief on what they saw and how they can do similar things. We have them do practice teaching in that summer school environment as well so that they have some experience before they go into the classroom in the fall. But our interns, after course work with us and with the university during the summer, after some field work during the summer, are teachers at the end of August with their own classes. And so that is an important piece.

The second part about the course work is that they come back each Monday night throughout the semester to have classes and opportunities to talk about specific issues, but also to debrief their week, to talk about the challenges that they face, to talk about how they might respond to those challenges in the following week, or next time it arises in a different and better way.

Intern support in the classroom is absolutely critical and that's what you just heard -- that it's true for any new teacher, but it's especially critical for those who are moving into the intern program from other fields. We have a mentor teacher who works regularly with the intern. That's not enough. We have commitments from principals where we place our interns that they are going to regularly observe, they're going to regularly send us the results of those observations so that our program can improve upon whatever issues that they're seeing.

And in addition to that, we have an alternative certification program specialist, one for every 25 interns who is in classrooms on a regular basis, observing, doing model lessons where needed, and talking with the intern about what needs to happen next.

[See Slide 7] Opportunities for growth are also critical, and again, this is for all teachers. But for our interns, what we do as part of our program is arrange for release time during the day, during some of the other ancillary classes when their children are in physical education, when their children are in art or music. They have the opportunity to go into the classrooms of exemplary teachers to watch what they're doing, to see how that is something that they might replicate in their own classroom.

We also provide substitute time for them so that they can go to other schools and see somebody who is the best in that grade or subject area in the district. In addition, the debriefing sessions are opportunities for them to grow and to analyze what's been happening. We provide some assistance for the state certification examinations so that they know what those examinations are and can pass them. And also they are encouraged to participate in other professional development sessions that our district offers.

We have interns. They range in age from 22 to 59 in any given class. The average age of this year's class is 38. They come to us either as the 22-year-old right out of college because they didn't want to engage in the teacher education program at their university, or they're coming from other careers. They've gone out into the business world, they've said yes, I have these things I thought I would have, I can go out to lunch if I want to, I have perhaps more respect as a business person than I thought I would have as a teacher, but at the end of the day, I don't have the feeling that I've really given anything back to my society, that I've really accomplished anything. So they want to come in.

The third group that comes in to us are those who are retired from their field of choice. They've got, frankly, their retirement pay and so when you add the teacher salary on top of that, they can afford to teach. And that is a major consideration for many people who are coming to us for math, science, engineering and technology. They can't afford the differential between what they would be paid in those fields and what they're paid as teachers. Even though in Texas our salaries in Houston start at $32,000 a year, they go up to about $55,000 a year, but that's not a good comparison to what they would make in those other areas.

We know that we have to look for evidence that this is someone who ought to be recommended for certification, and the recommendations for certification in Texas come from the university, from the school district, and from the principal. So we have the University of St. Thomas mentors and professors in classrooms observing. We have our own mentors, we have our ACP specialists, and we have our principals. And it's our principals who give the final recommendation. But it's based on all of the evidence that comes forward to them, including a portfolio of lessons and student work that each intern must create.

[See Slide 8] As we look at the program, one of the questions is, are we able to retain the interns once we get them? We're not going to retain 100 percent, just as we'll never retain 100 percent of the people who go into teaching because when they're actually in the classroom and discover what it is on a day-to-day basis, there are some who say, I'm not good at this. There are others who say, I'm not willing to do this amount of work. Teaching is hard work, each day and every day. And it's something that some people are willing to do and others discover that they thought they were willing to do it, they thought they understood what the challenges were, but when they get in there they discover that perhaps they don't.

In the state of Texas, the one-year retention rates are 70 percent. In Houston, in our alternative certification program, it's 86 percent. And we have a group of Teach for America students who are part of our alternative certification program, and that varies. The lowest year was about 30 people. This year, this next year coming we're going to have 80 interns. We've got about 50 this year who are in place. And they're one-year level, there's 94 percent. They make, as you know, a two-year commitment to teaching. What we're proudest of is that we keep some of those beyond that. If you look at our five-year retention rates, it's 60 percent for alternative certification program interns, 50 percent for regularly certified, 30 percent for Teach for America. But these are people who originally had said, I'll be here for two years.

[See Slide 9] And when we look at the percentages for Houston and Teach for America, overall we have 55 percent are still teaching. Out of the original core up to now, out of those there are 68 percent in graduate school. Nine percent of those are in education-related graduate school. Many of them spend three years in the classroom, decide that they would like to go back and get a masters in administration because they're on the fast track to becoming principals. And I can't tell you how much energy and commitment these young people bring to us as well as a solid academic preparation. That's what we've seen from our alternative certification program in general, and also from our Teach for America contingent with it.

Of the rest, 14 percent will go to work for nonprofits, many of them in Houston. So they're at the Children's Museum or they're at the Museum of Fine Arts, working on education programs, or they're working with local groups like the Summer Bridge program, which brings in high-risk students during the summer at middle school age, and works with high school students and college students as their teachers. And so, one of them is running that program. Nationally their retention rate in education is about 60 percent.

[Slide 10] When we look at evidence of success, these are scores of our students. This is '95-'97. Our scores have risen since then, so they would rise for these as well. We've recently been doing the Stanford. We've not yet done the analysis of Stanford Nine scores for our alternative certification program, but we're going to do that this spring. We are very pleased with our Stanford results. We are at or above grade level at every grade except 7th and 8th grade, 7th, 8th and 9th grade, and there we're just at the low average, which is the 40th percentile. So we're seeing major improvements in our school system.

In reading, these are teachers whose children took the TAAS test, which is our state-mandated criterion referenced test, and it's grades three through eight and ten. And for alternative certification program, it was 75 percent of the students passing. For Teach for America, 78.7, and traditionally certified 76.5. In mathematics, it was a little lower for all of them, though as I said we've improved our math scores as well. But you can see that the scores are about in the ballpark, and these are for people who are learning to teach.

I think I'd just like to finish with a couple of comments about what we're doing because we see this as one way that we can add to the teaching core in our school system. We've decided that, in fact, we need to understand that our students are going to continue to be challenging to teach, that our teachers are going to retire in greater numbers over the next five years than they have in the past. But we probably need to start to think as the Army has, that you're not going to keep people for a 25- or 30-year career. Everyone else in the business community has recognized that the mobility within professions is far greater now than it's ever been. And we need to have programs that prepare people well to teach, hope that they'll stay with us for more than the five years, but just as the Army constantly produces people who can run nuclear submarines within a year, we need to have people who in a year's time can get up and running on how to teach well, and then continue to improve their craft, hope that they'll stay with us for 25 years. But recognize that our programs must be ready to bring in the next generation if those people do leave us.

The last thing is, as I look at your recommendations, my only caution to you would be to think about the notion of a state salary schedule. We're hoping to convince our state to move away from a salary schedule that links the length of time in teaching to the salary levels because we believe that the way to keep high performing people is to be able to offer them higher salaries. To compete with math and science, we're going to need to be able to offer math-science salaries that are competitive with what these young people would get if they went to work for Arthur Andersen or Lockheed or INTEL. So it's something that we have to work on. And if we have a lock-step salary system, then we're encouraging the maintenance of the same traditional way of doing things that may not be in the best interest of teachers or school systems.

Thank you very much and I'm delighted to answer questions.

[Part 1: Shroyer]

[Part 3: Shroyer/Sclafani Questions]