Middle School Teacher Preparation:
Mississippi
Delivering Well Prepared Teachers Policy
Analysis of Mississippi's policies
Mississippi offers a middle school license to teach grades 4-8. The state also offers a supplemental endorsement to teach grades 7-8 that can be added to an existing license. Teachers with a 4-8 license must also complete an interdisciplinary program of studies with two or more areas of concentration. The state also articulates that candidates for a license to teach grades 7-12 earn a major in the licensed content area.
All new middle school teachers in Mississippi teaching the core subjects in middle school grades are also required to pass a single-subject Praxis II content test to attain licensure; a general content knowledge test is not an option.
Commendably, Mississippi does not offer a K-8 generalist license.
Mississippi addresses some of the instructional shifts toward building content knowledge and vocabulary through careful reading of
informational and literary texts associated with the state's college-
and career-readiness standards for students through its
required assessment for middle school English teachers, the Praxis II
Middle School English Language Arts (5047) test.
Neither teacher standards nor testing frameworks in other content areas address incorporating literacy skills.
Regarding struggling readers, Mississippi's middle school
English content test requires that a teacher "knows commonly used
research-based approaches to grouping and differentiated instruction to
meet specific instructional objectives in English Language Arts" and
"understands commonly used research-based strategies for teaching
adolescent reading."
Recommendations for Mississippi
Ensure that middle school teachers are prepared to meet the instructional requirements of college- and career-readiness standards
for students.
Incorporate informational text of increasing complexity into classroom instruction.
Although
Mississippi's English language arts content test for middle school
teachers addresses informational texts, the state should strengthen its
policy and ensure that teachers are able to challenge students with
texts of increasing complexity.
Incorporate literacy skills as an integral part of every subject.
To
ensure that middle school students are capable of accessing varied
information about the world around them, Mississippi should also—either
through testing frameworks or teacher standards—include literacy skills
and using text to build content knowledge in history/social studies,
science, technical subjects and the arts.
Support struggling readers.
Mississippi should
articulate more specific requirements ensuring that middle school
teachers are prepared to intervene and support students who are
struggling. While college- and career-readiness standards will increase
the need for all middle school teachers to be able to help struggling
readers to comprehend grade-level material, training for English
language arts teachers in particular must emphasize identification and
remediation of reading deficiencies.
Ensure meaningful content tests.
To ensure meaningful middle school content tests, Mississippi should reevaluate its passing scores so that all tests reflect high levels of performance. All four of the passing scores for the Praxis II middle school content tests are set below the 10th percentile.
State response to our analysis
Mississippi noted that middle school teachers are subject-specific teachers and do not teach general education. According to the state, teachers of grades 6-12 are required to hold certification (via the Praxis II in the subject area or 21 hours in the subject area as required by NCLB to be highly qualified) to teach the subject area. Any teacher teaching out of area without being highly qualified creates an accreditation violation for the school/district.
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Mississippi
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Delivering Well Prepared Teachers
- Admission into Teacher Preparation
- Elementary Teacher Preparation
- Elementary Teacher Preparation in Reading Instruction
- Elementary Teacher Preparation in Mathematics
- Early Childhood
- Middle School Teacher Preparation
- Secondary Teacher Preparation
- Secondary Teacher Preparation in Science and Social Studies
- Special Education Teacher Preparation
- Special Education Preparation in Reading
- Assessing Professional Knowledge
- Student Teaching
- Teacher Preparation Program Accountability
Expanding the Pool of Teachers
Identifying Effective Teachers
- State Data Systems
- Evaluation of Effectiveness
- Frequency of Evaluations
- Tenure
- Licensure Advancement
- Equitable Distribution
Retaining Effective Teachers
Exiting Ineffective Teachers
Pensions
Research rationale
States must
differentiate middle school teacher preparation from that of elementary
teachers.
Middle school grades are critical years of schooling. It is
in these years that far too many students fall through the cracks. However,
requirements for the preparation and licensure of middle school teachers are
among the weakest state policies. Too many states fail to distinguish the
knowledge and skills needed by middle school teachers from those needed by an
elementary teacher. Whether teaching a single subject in a departmentalized
setting or teaching multiple subjects in a self-contained setting, middle
school teachers must be able to teach significantly more advanced content than
elementary teachers do. The notion that someone should be identically prepared
to teach first grade or eighth grade mathematics seems ridiculous, but states
that license teachers on a K-8 generalist certificate essentially endorse this
idea.
College- and career-readiness standards require significant shifts in literacy instruction.
College- and career-readiness standards for K-12 students adopted by nearly all states require from teachers a different focus on literacy integrated into all subject areas. The standards demand that teachers are prepared to bring complex text and academic language into regular use, emphasize the use of evidence from informational and literary texts and build knowledge and vocabulary through content-rich text. While most states have not ignored teachers' need for training and professional development related to these instructional shifts, few states have attended to the parallel need to align teacher competencies and requirements for teacher preparation so that new teachers will enter the classroom ready to help students meet the expectations of these standards. Because middle school teachers in most states can be licensed either to be multi-subject teachers or generalists, middle school teachers need specialized preparation. Particularly for single subject teachers of areas other than English language arts, these instructional shifts may be especially acute.
Middle School Teacher Preparation: Supporting Research
A
report published by the National Mathematics Advisory Panel (NMAP) concludes
that a teacher's knowledge of math makes a difference in student achievement. U.S.
Department of Education. Foundations for Success: The Final Report of the National Mathematics Advisory Panel.
Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Education (2008).
For
additional research on the importance of subject matter knowledge, see T. Dee and S. Cohodes, "Out-of-Field Teachers and Student Achievement: Evidence from Matched-Pairs Comparisons." Public
Finance Review, Volume 36, No. 1, January 2008, pp. 7-32; B.
Chaney, "Student outcomes and the professional preparation of eighth-grade teachers in science and mathematics," in NSF/NELS:88 Teacher transcript analysis, 1995, ERIC, ED389530, 112 p.; H. Wenglinsky, How Teaching Matters: Bringing the Classroom Back Into Discussions of Teacher Quality (Princeton, NJ:
Educational Testing Service, 2000).
For
information on the "ceiling effect," see D. Goldhaber and D. Brewer,
"When should we reward degrees for teachers?" in Phi Delta
Kappan, Volume 80, No. 2, October 1998, pp. 134, 136-138.
For an extensive summary of the research base supporting the instructional shifts associated with college- and career-readiness standards, see "Research Supporting the Common Core ELA Literacy Shifts and Standards" available from Student Achievement Partners.