Whitney Tilson's School Reform Blog: Plan to raise standards for new teachers proceeds

More on the incredible things RI’s Deborah Gist is doing:

Starting next fall, it will be harder to become a teacher in Rhode Island.

As promised, Education Commissioner Deborah A. Gist, who has made improving teacher quality the cornerstone of her five-month-old administration, is moving forward with her plan to raise the standards for prospective teachers.

But in a compromise, Gist said she will phase in the tougher requirements over a two-year period instead of one, as she originally proposed.

Over the objection of several of the state’s teacher training programs — including the largest at Rhode Island College — Gist is significantly increasing the scores people who want to become teachers must achieve to be accepted into the teacher training programs. She says the change is part of a larger effort to revamp the entire career track of educators, starting with who is allowed to become a teacher.

“We know that while there are many factors that contribute to student success, teachers’ own academic achievement is an important factor,” Gist said. “This change is just a tiny step in an entire strategy we have to raise expectations for our educators and for ourselves, in supporting educators at every point in their careers.”

Gist informed local colleges and universities that they have to increase the “cut scores” students must achieve on a basic skills test required by all of the state’s teacher training programs starting next fall, and raise it even higher in the fall of 2011.

Currently, Rhode Island ranks among the lowest in the nation, alongside Mississippi and Guam, with cut scores in math, reading and writing set at 170 in each subject. At that score, about 30 percent of test-takers in Rhode Island fail the test, called Praxis I or the PPST, pre-professional skills test.

Gist says she wants to raise the scores to the highest in the country. She was willing to phase in the changes over two years, she said, to give the eight colleges and universities and one nonprofit program time to adjust and to avoid a dramatic drop in the number of new teaching students in a single year.

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