Washington, D.C. – With funding from the MetLife Foundation, NCATE has initiated an Urban Teacher Residency Project to study teacher residency programs, which are targeted at preparing and retaining qualified teachers in high needs schools.

Teacher residency programs are district-based teacher preparation programs built around a year-long internship with a skilled mentor teacher (the “residency”) in an urban school. Residencies share common principles. (1) Education theory and classroom practice are tightly woven together. (2) Candidates learn alongside an experienced, effective mentor. (3) Teacher candidates are grouped in cohorts. (4) Residencies build constructive partnerships with districts, schools, communities, universities and unions. (5) Residencies serve school districts. (6) Residents are supported once they are hired as a teacher of record. (7) Residencies establish and support differentiated career roles for veteran teachers.

NCATE has formed an Urban Teacher Residency Advisory Board which will provide NCATE policy boards with recommendations as to how NCATE can affiliate with these programs. The initial purpose is to open a dialogue between NCATE and these programs and to explore ways that NCATE and the programs can work together. The directors of teacher residency programs in Denver, Boston, Chattanooga and Chicago are advisory board members, as well as teacher educators, researchers, and National Board Certified Teachers.

Art Wise, president of NCATE, says, “We do not yet know what the outcome of the project will be. The urban residency programs will help NCATE think about another way of preparing highly qualified teachers specifically for urban schools. NCATE is committed to helping solve the staffing problems of urban schools, and wants to understand the most efficacious ways to prepare urban teachers.”

The residency programs are relatively new—Chicago’s is six years old, BTR is in its fifth year, and the rest have been operating only three or four years, but some have ambitious goals for the number of candidates they want to prepare, and most focus on attracting and retaining teachers in shortage fields.

Jesse Solomon, Director of the Boston Teacher Residency Program, says “there was a mismatch in the pipeline of teacher candidates. Boston needed to find a way to increase the number of applicants in STEM fields and special education, while also increasing the numbers of teachers of color. Boston was losing half its new teachers within their first three years. So we needed to find a way to retain those teachers as well. In the BTR, all candidates earn dual-licensure in special education, and over half of the middle/high school candidates are prepared in STEM fields. In addition, over half of our Residents are people of color. The retention rate for our program is currently 90 percent. We are currently preparing 84 teachers, and plan to grow to 100 and then 120 teachers over the next two years – reaching scale when we prepare approximately 30 percent of the district’s need. We are highly selective; we have historically accepted about one candidate in six.”

Donald Feinstein, Executive Director of the Academy for Urban School Leadership, the Chicago residency program, says “all of our teachers commit to five years. The Academy currently operates eight Chicago public schools; we use our residency program trainees to staff the schools that we turn around. We have a dual mission: educating teachers who are immersed in an intense clinical experience, and raising the achievement levels of their P-12 students.”

Marsha Levine and Antoinette Mitchell are co-directors of the NCATE Urban Teacher Residency Project. Levine is Senior Consultant, Professional Development Schools for NCATE. Levine was at the helm during the development of professional development school standards for the field, and has a long history of directing collaborations between P-12 and higher education. Antoinette Mitchell is Vice President, Unit Operations at NCATE, and formerly a researcher at the Urban Institute. For more information on the project, see the attached contact list.

NCATE is the teaching profession’s accrediting body for educator preparation, and is recognized by the U.S. Department of Education and the Council on Higher Education Accreditation as a specialized accrediting body. For more information on the project, contact Levine or Mitchell at 202/466-7496 or see the attached list of urban teacher residency program directors.

 Urban Teacher Residency Project Contacts