Barnett Berry Featured in Medill Reports Story on Pathways to Teaching
A new report from Strategic Management of Human Capital could bring good holiday tidings to human resource professionals tasked with recruiting and keeping top teacher talent in traditionally hard-to-staff urban districts. The group uses case study analyses in areas such as New York, Chicago, Boston, and Long Beach, California to suggest that these large districts have made progress with potentially scalable strategies including early hiring and alternative preparation programs.
However, as Barnett Berry tells the writer of a recent article in Medill Reports, alternate pathway programs like Teach for America aren't necessarily a cure-all for urban schools' ills. "To think that you can get prepared to teach in an urban school in five weeks is foolhardy at best," he warns. However, Berry also doesn't offer a reprieve to all traditional teacher preparation. "The critics of (traditional) teacher education are spot on. There are education schools that aren't doing their job. But the fact that they're not doing their job doesn't mean we should do away with them at large."
See if you agree with Berry's recommendations for comprehensively preparing new teachers for the students who need them most by accessing the article, "Need a Degree to Teach ABC?" at Northwestern's Medill Reports online.
