In this article we examine induction policies and practices for new alternatively certified mathematics teachers in the country's largest urban school district, New York City. Our focus is on the support system for such teachers as it is legislated and as it is enacted. This includes the induction and general supports (e.g., mentoring, coaching, networks) that are available to mathematics teachers in the New York City Teaching Fellows Program (NYCTF). Data sources include a survey of one entire cohort of Fellows (N=167), at WEST VIRGINA UNIV on March 11, 2015 eus.sagepub.com Downloaded from Foote et al.
397as well as more in depth interviews and written reflections from 12 case study Fellows. Results indicate that the supports, while as espoused seem adequate, as delivered are inconsistent and in many cases inadequate. A key finding is that many teachers found that informal relationships, usually within their local school settings, provided more effective support to help them through their first years of teaching mathematics. This research has implications for the induction of alternatively certified teachers and more generally of all new teachers particularly those in urban schools.
This study examines the extent to which the New York City Teaching Fellows (NYCTF) has delivered on its promise of improving mathematics teacher diversity, preparedness, effectiveness, and retention in hard-to-staff city schools. As a program theory evaluation study, it articulates the theory of action for selective alternative route programs and uses this to evaluate NYCTF’s program for secondary mathematics. The analysis draws on longitudinal data from 620 secondary mathematics teachers who began NYCTF in the prior decade. While the results point to potential improvements, it provides evidence that selective programs like NYCTF serve to maintain important gaps in teacher quality that they were designed to address.
This article presents a critique of a teacher quality agenda promoted by a network of elitiste organizations in the United States. Network leaders posit that gaps in teacher quality cause achievement gaps. Their solution is to incentivize the graduates of the nation’s most selective colleges to teach in hard-to-staff schools. Summarizing prior results from secondary mathematics, this article argues that selective college graduates do not make particularly effective teachers and, given their high rates of attrition, do more harm than good. It concludes with the recommendation to invest instead in the development of community teachers to teach core subjects like mathematics.
Proponents of critical mathematics (CM) argue that it has the potential to be more equitable and socially empowering than other approaches to mathematics education. In this article, the author presents results from a practitioner research study of his own teaching of CM to low-income students of color in a U.S. context. The results pertain to the evolution of his reflections about the potentially enhancing relationship between the critical and the mathematical components of CM and the nature of student empowerment as he designed and taught with CM materials. The results point to curricular and instructional factors that present serious barriers to effective implementation of CM at the secondary level.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.