KIPP/AF/US's new teacher training institute

1) Some AMAZING news from the Robin Hood benefit last night: the teacher training institute that KIPP, Achievement First and Uncommon Schools are forming in NYC, which will eventually grow to train 500 urban teachers annually, received full funding of $30 MILLION!!!!  I've long felt that this could among the most important things that these organizations do, for a number of reasons:

a) The primary barrier to growth for these organizations (and other top charter school operators) is lack of great teachers, so this institute should help alleviate this bottleneck, providing many more better-prepared and better-trained teachers.

 

b) A secondary problem is that these organizations currently hire the very best teachers, regardless of certification.  It turns out that some of these teachers are not certified, which means that they have to waste huge amounts of time and money to become certified.  This is madness.  Imagine a badass math teacher who, every year, takes an incoming class of 5th graders who are doing math on average at the 3rd grade level and, in one year, brings them up to grade level -- that's THREE years of learning in ONE year!  Why, pray tell, would ANYONE think it's sensible to require this teacher to get certified?! 

 

While it's unlikely the certification requirements will go away, the institute will at least alleviate this problem.

 

c) Our schools of education in this country are ABYSMALLY bad.  See Arthur Levine's devastating report documenting this at http://www.edschools.org/reports_leaders.htm, and see my blog post at http://edreform.blogspot.com/2006/06/newoldschoolteacher-blog-ed-school.html, which has excerpts from the blog of a friend who actually attended Columbia Teachers College, supposedly one of the best programs in the country -- her stories of the useless nonsense and politically correct bullshit she's forced to endure are hilarious, yet sickening. 

 

No doubt many top-notch people who want to become teachers abandon the idea once they learn that they'll have to attend this type of school.  Thus, the new institute will provide an avenue for these people to enter the profession and prepare them well so they can be effective teachers as soon as they enter the classroom.  Perhaps more importantly over time, the institute might become a role model for reforming other schools of education.  (OK, maybe that's hopelessly naive, but one can dream, right?)