Dive Brief:

• When students get the benefit of a full year in a classroom with a master teacher through a residency program, they start their careers better prepared than their peers in traditional teacher prep programs who are more likely to get about 15 weeks of clinical experience.
• Karen DeMoss, director of Bank Street College’s Sustainable Funding Project, writes for The Hechinger Report that new teachers who completed residencies have better classroom management skills and they are better at planning lessons and developing a long-term curricular vision.
• Researchers have found students in classrooms with teachers who completed residencies have better academic outcomes, and DeMoss says these teachers benefit from more time to learn about professionalism from their mentors, and they are more employable and more likely to stay in the field.

Dive Insight:

As teachers have been blamed for the failings of the U.S. education system, teacher preparation programs have taken their fair share of heat. Former Secretary of Education Arne Duncan recently posted an open letter to the leaders of these schools, calling on them to take responsibility and increase the rigor of the programs and their standards for their students.

The U.S. Department of Education released new regulations for teacher prep programs on Wednesday, stepping up accountability for programs that send their teachers all over the country. It has been hard to hold schools accountable for their future teachers, but these regulations may provide a clearer line from specific programs to the teachers they produce.