The district has now taken steps to train and support its new teachers. Before they start teaching, all teachers on emergency permit must now take a 40-hour pre-service class. Since last July, all elementary teachers and secondary English and math teachers have been required to enroll in the district‘s Pre-Intern Teaching Program, which includes classes one evening a week and the assignment of an experienced mentor teacher to help out at the school site. Teachers stay in the program for a year or two until they can pass their subject-matter exams (the MSAT) and move into an internship program, which in turn usually lasts two years and is administered by either the district or a university.
Most new teachers interviewed for this story were grateful for the preparation they received in the 40-hour class, which for many is the only training they receive before setting foot in a classroom. Others were less enthusiastic and some were highly critical, but very few had many positive things to say about the pre-intern program, which they complained consisted of a lot of busywork, largely oriented toward preparing them for the MSAT and offering very little of what they craved most: practical information they could immediately apply on the job. As one teacher puts it, ”You want to know how to deal with the kid who’s peeing in the classroom.“
Teachers‘ complaints about the pre-intern program -- which, in its first year, is very much a work in progress -- generally had their roots in the quality of instruction. The classes are taught by veteran LAUSD teachers, and their usefulness depends largely on the skills of the individual instructor. In this respect, the pre-intern program is caught in the same bind as the rest of the district: There are not enough good experienced teachers to teach L.A.’s children, let alone its teachers. Lillian Utsumi, who administers the program for the district, admits that she has had trouble finding qualified instructors, and estimates that she hired about 90 percent of the teachers she interviewed. The same challenges plague the pre-internship program‘s mentoring component: ”We have some schools,“ Utsumi says, ”where no one is qualified to be a mentor, because no one has the experience.“
The district internship program, which accepts new teachers who have already passed the MSAT, has gotten better reviews from teachers, though they too gripe that it is disorganized and the quality of the teaching is haphazard.
As a result, many new teachers say they still get their most valuable support informally from helpful colleagues or administrators, often by running to a neighboring classroom for a quick piece of advice. Exhausted by the effort of trying to meet their students’ needs while learning the profession, most admit to feeling terribly unprepared. Although new teachers often compare themselves favorably to their more experienced but sometimes more burned-out co-workers, they‘re up-front about their own failings. As one first-grade teacher who was assigned to a class made up entirely of English-language learners without having received any training in teaching ESL says, ”Some days I feel like I’m a disservice to my kids.“ This lack of preparedness worries even someone as open to the potentials of unqualified teachers as Weemes principal Kessler: ”Each teacher is taking a year of a kid‘s life. Two years of bad teaching and a kid will never recover.“
Proposed solutions abound, from Gray Davis’ home-mortgage incentives for teachers, to UTLA‘s and the CTA’s insistence that teacher salaries get a significant hike, to a district-sponsored program that would begin training interested students to be teachers in high school, to many new teachers‘ desire for far more intensive and structured mentoring. Whatever plans are ultimately adopted, though, will likely have little effect on the real problems behind the teacher-shortage crisis: the glaring social inequities that turned a possibly well-intentioned if politically motivated program -- class-size reduction -- into a vast and cruel experiment conducted on the state’s neediest children.
