Aspiring teachers fall short on math
Nearly 75 percent fail revamped section of state licensing test
MALDEN - Nearly three-quarters of the aspiring elementary school teachers who took the state's licensing exam this year failed the new math section, according to results being released today that focus on the subject for the first time.
Education leaders said the high failure rate reflects what they feared, that too many elementary classroom and special education teachers do not have a strong background in math and are in many ways responsible for poor student achievement in the subject, even in middle and high schools.
Elementary school teachers, including those in charge of first-grade classrooms, are considered the front line of math instruction, providing the building blocks of computation and mathematical reasoning that students must master before tackling algebra, trigonometry, and calculus later in their academic lives.
Previously, elementary school teachers could potentially receive a state license without answering a single math question correctly on the general curriculum exam. That's because math was folded in with the other subjects - language arts, history, social science, science, and child development - to generate an overall score. Now math is scored separately as a subtest of that exam.
Mitchell Chester, the state's commissioner of elementary and secondary education, said in an interview yesterday that in some ways the high failure rate was not surprising. Only about 27 percent of the more than 600 teaching candidates who took the test in March, the first time it was administrated, passed the exam. The test included questions on geometry, statistics, and probability.
"While we have a lot to be proud of in Massachusetts about student math achievement, not all our students are receiving a strong math education, particularly in elementary school grades and particularly among students with disabilities," Chester said. "This test is designed to ensure our workforce, our teachers, have a strong understanding of math if they are going to teach math."
Some educators, including representatives of teachers unions and school administrator groups, place blame squarely on teacher preparation programs for failing to adequately train elementary school and special education teachers in math instruction, which is often overshadowed by the critical skills of reading and writing.
"The high failure rate puts a shining light on a deficiency in teacher-prep programs," said Tom Scott, executive director of the Massachusetts Association of School Superintendents. "If you look at transcripts of some applicants for elementary school teaching positions, it's possible you could see a transcript without anything math related. Someone could have last taken a math class in high school."
Since the state began developing the new testing requirement two years ago, teacher colleges across the state have been beefing up math instruction, requiring students to pass not only traditional math courses but also the pedagogy of teaching math. State guidelines now call for three to four courses in math. Chester said some colleges are not moving quickly enough with change.
Richard Freeland, commissioner of the state Department of Higher Education, said yesterday that both public and private colleges are doing the best they can to revamp programs in a short time. Fitchburg State and Boston University bolstered math requirements last fall, while Bridgewater State and Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts will do the same this fall. Others are still developing new courses.
A few colleges - Westfield State, Wheelock, and Lesley - were already in compliance.
"The lead time institutes had to set up new guidelines was not sufficient to make the programmatic changes to help prepare students," Freeland said. "The way higher education works is, when you put new requirements into place, they can only affect new students coming in. . . . Course requirements are considered contractual by the courts. You can only advise current students to take additional courses."
"It's not reasonable to whack colleges too hard for not teaching to a set of requirements that only have recently been established," Freeland said.
State education leaders enacted the new certification requirement so Bay State students can better compete internationally. Massachusetts lags behind parts of China and other Asian countries on international measures, even though the state routinely tops national standardized tests. Just last week, the American Institutes for Research released a report entitled "Why Massachusetts Students, the Best in the US, Lag Behind Best-in-the-World Students of Hong Kong."
The most severe problems in math have been in middle schools, where only about half of students are proficient in the subject on the MCAS. The poor results are the primary reason the state has designated approximately three-quarters of the state's middle schools for improvement under the federal No Child Left Behind law.
The Massachusetts Teachers Association, the state's largest teachers union, has been calling for an overhaul of teacher-preparation programs, including a stronger emphasis on the teaching of math. However, the association questioned yesterday whether the new math test was a true indicator of how much elementary school teachers know in math.
"As a teacher, if I gave an exam and saw a 27 percent pass rate, my first inclination would not be to say there is something wrong with the people who took the test. It would be, is there something wrong with the test or something wrong with instruction?" said Kathleen Skinner, director of the association's Center for Education Policy and Practice.
The high failure rates could cause difficulty for some schools in filling positions, especially in special education, where the state faces a critical shortage of teachers.
In response, Chester is asking the state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education today to approve a temporary measure, effective for the next three years, that would allow test takers who just miss the passing mark on the math section to receive initial teaching licenses. Those teachers, however, will be required to retake and pass the test within five years. If approved, the change would bump up the March pass rate by 15 percentage points to 42 percent.
"The failure rate isn't because we have placed some arcane, really hard, high-level math on the test," said Robert Bickerton, associate commissioner for the Elementary and Secondary Education Department, "What we've done is say you need to know this math deeply and you need to be able to answer your students when they ask why." 