The Chronicle: Entrepreneur Offers Alternative Teacher Training at New College in Chicago
Randy Best, a Dallas investor and founder of the American College of Education, wants to revolutionize how teachers are trained in the United States, and he plans to work with school districts across the country to do it.
Under his model, school districts contract with the for-profit college, which then tailors a curriculum to meet local needs. Admission to the college’s master’s programs is available only to teachers in the partner districts, and in exchange the district allows the college to teach its courses in public-school classrooms. About half the course work is done online.It is an arrangement that both college and school officials say is convenient for teachers and cuts down on overhead costs and, ultimately, tuition.
Tuition during the first year of operation, which started October 2005 and will end September 2006, was $1,000 a course, or about $12,000 a program. The Chicago Public Schools — which is the only district to contract with the college so far — paid $300 to $400 of the cost per student, according to a school official. Now the college has dropped its tuition to $3,900 for each 12-course master’s program, and because of the reduced cost, the public schools will not pick up part of the tab.
The college has made adjustments to the tuition of the students in the first cohort so they do not end up paying more than the incoming students, says a college spokeswoman, Rena M. Pederson.
By comparison, tuition for a master’s degree in education at DePaul University, in Chicago, is $455 an hour, or about $23,660 for the entire program.
The American College of Education is authorized to operate only in the Chicago area right now, but Mr. Best envisions its moving into urban areas across the country.
It began offering two master’s degrees in education — one in educational leadership and one in curriculum and instruction — in October 2005, after purchasing Barat College, a small liberal-arts college in suburban Chicago, that month.
The terms of the deal were not made public, but DePaul University, which owned Barat at the time of the sale, received a financial interest in the American College of Education, according to documents submitted to the Illinois Board of Higher Education. Investors provided $10-million in start-up money for the institution, according to the documents.
The college focuses on teaching techniques — based on research done by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development — that Mr. Best says have proved effective in sharpening elementary- and secondary-school students’ literacy and mathematics skills.
For example, teachers are taught to assess their students after every lesson and to use vocabulary words across different disciplines to increase comprehension, says Reid Lyon, who oversaw much of the national institute’s research and now works as executive vice president for research and evaluation at Higher Ed Holdings, the parent company of the American College of Education.
The college’s courses address “real world” challenges, such as dealing with diverse populations in an urban setting. Many of the professors have worked in public schools.
Many existing colleges of education, Mr. Best says, allow professors too much freedom to teach whatever they please, often ignoring research on what skills make for effective teaching. “Relevancy is critical — that we approach this not only from the research but also from the practitioner’s perspective,” he says.
Arthur Levine, the longtime president of Columbia University’s Teachers College, who will retire this month, says that charges of incompetence at colleges of education are easier to make than to prove. Certainly there are some weak colleges, he says, but it is not clear that the alternatives popping up are any better.
“The problem with education schools is we don’t know the impact of teacher education on the performance of students in the classroom,” says Mr. Levine, who in recent years has been a vocal critic of teacher education in the United States. And new colleges, like the American College of Education, do not have that data either, he says.
Sharon P. Robinson, president of the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education, a professional association for colleges and other organizations that train teachers, says the real test of the American College of Education will be whether the teachers it trains are able to improve student learning. “The data will speak, and we will be listening,” Ms. Robinson says.
Nationwide Plans
Mr. Best developed the idea for the American College of Education while running Voyager Expanded Learning, a company that sells supplementary reading and math programs to school districts. “We learned in that process that no matter how good the curriculum was, it wasn’t as important as the instructional quality,” he says.
When Mr. Best sold Voyager to a Michigan company, in January 2005, he had already laid the groundwork for the American College of Education. Mr. Best recruited Roderick R. Paige, secretary of education during President Bush’s first term, and Adm. Thomas B. Hayward, a former member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to sit on the college’s Board of Directors. Also on the board are Robert S. Peterkin, director of Harvard University’s Urban Superintendents Program; a DePaul administrator; and a senior vice president of ACT, the testing service.
Michael A. Moses, the college’s chief executive officer and chairman of the board, is a former superintendent of the Dallas Independent School District and was Texas’ Commissioner of Education when President Bush was governor.
The Chicago Public Schools contracted with the college to train its teachers in large part because of the management team’s credentials, according to Ray Salazar, communications and curriculum manager for the school system’s office of principal preparation and development. Under the agreement, teachers are still allowed to get a master’s degree from any college, but they are encouraged to enroll at the American College of Education because it has aligned its courses with the key leadership skills the school system requires.
Twenty-five teachers, many of them interested in becoming principals, enrolled in the master’s in leadership program last fall. The Chicago Public Schools system is in the process of recruiting teachers to enter the college’s two master’s programs this fall, and the number of participants has not been finalized.
The American College of Education has estimated it would have 225 students and more than $1.8-million in tuition revenue in its second year of operation, according to documents submitted to the Illinois Board of Higher Education.
The leadership team plans to expand the college into other districts in Illinois and Texas if it gets permission from its accreditor, the Higher Learning Commission of the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools. And Mr. Best hopes the college will one day have a presence in urban areas nationwide. “I think this is going to really make a difference in the quality of our teachers,” he says.
His investors have millions riding on it.
Follow
