I received a letter from Ed Johnson questioning the rationale for naming the APS central office, “The Alonzo A. Crim Center for Learning and Leadership.”

Dr. Crim was superintendent of the Atlanta Public Schools, 1973 – 1988, and then became Professor of Education at Georgia State University where he established a new chair, the Benjamin E. Mays Professor of Urban Leadership. His legacy is embodied in the Alonzo A. Crim Center for Urban Educational Excellence, at Georgia State University’s College of Education & Human Development.

Mr. Johnson has persisted in questioning the current APS Board of Education and Superintendent’s test based “reform” model in which schools will be rated, and subject to the ravaging effect of labeling many schools failure’s and then either closing them, or turning the school into a corporate run charter school. He takes issue, philosophically and practically, that the Board and Superintendent do not understand school improvement, and the lack the wisdom that Dr. Crim possessed.

Teacher Education at GSU

In the 1980’s we at Georgia State University (GSU) explored ways to prepare people for secondary teaching in science, mathematics and foreign language. Our first venture in “alternative teacher education” was a collaborative effort among GSU, Clark-Atlanta University, the Atlanta Public Schools (APS), and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT). And Dr. Alonzo A. Crim was Superintendent of the APS, and he fully endorsed what we were planning to do. I remember meeting him at a kick off reception for the APS teachers, university professors, and the students who enrolled in the program. He was very supportive of this effort to prepare teachers to work in high schools in the APS.

TRIPS

The program that AFT created was called the TRIPS teacher preparation program, and in addition to Atlanta, the program was implemented in the cities I cite below.

Firstly, the AFT had developed a research-based approach to teacher education, and held seminars for practicing teachers in five or six major urban school districts, eg. Washington, DC, San Francisco, Boston, Houston, Atlanta, and Chicago. The AFT research-based program was developed in collaboration with researchers at universities around the country. If we were going to introduce teachers to ways to implement cooperative learning, the activities we did with teachers or teacher candidates was based on most recent research about cooperative learning. The AFT program was designed by Lovely Billups, an amazing teacher educator who worked with researchers around the country. She led the instruction for the APS teacher candidates in the summer of 1987 prior to their teaching in an APS high school.

The APS invested a lot to this program, and I am sure it was because Dr. Crim knew that we were on the right track. For each teacher they hired, they invested 1/5 of each new teacher’s yearly salary, and 1/5 to 2/5’s of each mentor teacher’s salary. Although this does not compare with what school districts pay Teacher for America, it was a significant investment into the preparation of teachers.

After the summer program, the new teachers were then placed in an Atlanta high school and assigned to a master teacher as their mentor. The new teacher was given a reduced teaching load (from 5 preps to 4), while the mentor was also given a reduced teaching load, and their schedules were arranged so that they had a double planning period together, and the mentor was also free when one of the new teacher’s classes was in session. Using co-teaching, and mentoring, the two worked together, with other faculty in the department, during the year. In addition, a professor (myself for science) worked with the mentors and new teachers throughout the school year, visiting the school, observing, conferring, and trying to become a part of the school.

Dr. Billup’s teaching was so remarkable, that I suggested to my department head that we hire her to do an “in-service” workshop for my professor colleagues. It was interesting to observe my colleagues who thought they knew it all in terms of teacher education. Dr. Billup left them in the dust.

Alternative Teachers Education Program

Two years later we received five years of grants money from the Georgia Professional Standards Commission, and used the funds to create an Alternative Teacher Education Program in science, mathematics and foreign language. Thirty prospective teachers were admitted to the program and enrolled in an 8 week summer institute followed by a clinical teaching experience in a public school in the state of Georgia under the supervision of a mentor teacher and a university professor in science, mathematics or foreign language.

In the fifth year we received grant money to conduct a research study to investigate the effect of the alternative program and make recommendation for the future of local teacher education at GSU.

TEEMS

Our research resulted in the creation of a new full-time teacher education program at GSU in mathematics and science for secondary preparation. The program was named TEEMS (Teacher Education Environments in Mathematics and Science). The program was intense with students taking courses in mathematics and science, doing clinical experiences in a middle and high school, conducting collaborative research, and earning a master’s degree in either mathematics or science education. TEEMS was a four semester full-time program for graduates with degrees in mathematics, science or engineering (as well as other science related fields such as nursing). In the first year, 1993, over 100 students applied for 30 positions in science and 30 in mathematics. The program continued all the while I was there (in 2003 I retired) and beyond, and now is the program for preparing secondary teachers (now not only in mathematics and science, but social studies and English education). From 1993 until I retired in 2003, we graduated nearly 600 students in mathematics and science teaching, most of whom took teaching positions in the Atlanta area. We also integrated TEEMS with our doctoral program in science education, most of whom were science teachers in the Atlanta area. We hired many of these doctoral students to teach in the Summer Institute, which kicked off the one-year program.

Our research on our own Alternative Teacher Education Program, convinced us and provided support for the notion that a summer institute is simply not enough to prepare people to be competent and well prepared teachers. Research by Darling-Hammond, Chung, and Frelow found that teachers prepared in teacher education programs felt better prepared across most dimensions of teaching rather than those who entered teaching through alternative programs. They also found he extent to which teachers felt well prepared when they entered teaching was significantly correlated with their sense of teaching efficacy, their sense of responsibility for student learning, and their plans to remain in teaching. These are significant finding in the context of the drive to place non-certified and non-prepared teachers into classrooms that typically are more demanding and require more knowledge about learning and student development than these individuals can deliver. The knowledge base on teaching is enormous, and to think that we can prepare teachers in 5 – 8 week institutes not only devalues what we know about preparing teachers for practice.

Programs such as The New Teacher Project and Teach for America (not new ideas in teacher education, by the way—remember the AFT Trips program), cost millions of dollars (local system pay a big ransom fee), and push into teaching people who are ill-prepared to teach in public schools.

My main point of this long reply to Ed Johnson’s letter, is that it was Dr. Alonzo Crim who provided the initial support as superintendent of APS that teacher education must be a collaborative effort among universities and public schools, and be based on an experiential learning mode.