In the Clinton administration, Terry Dozier was the U.S. secretary of education's senior adviser on teaching.

She is a former national teacher of the year.

She has taught inner-city children in Gainesville, Fla., and in Miami. She has taught elementary school, middle school, high school.

And after 19 years in the classroom and eight years toiling in the highest ranks of national educational policy, she has come to a rock-hard conclusion about what helps children learn and achieve.

The conclusion is this: Nothing beats a good teacher.

Soon, Dozier will have a chance to put her theory into practice in some of this area's neediest schools.

Her proposal-writing skills, coupled with ongoing local efforts, won a $5.9 million federal grant for Virginia Commonwealth University's School of Education.

"The focus for this entire grant is to increase student achievement . . . especially increase achievement for our poor- est students," said Dozier, director of VCU's Center for Teacher Leadership.

School systems in Richmond and Chesterfield, Hanover and Henrico counties will be beneficiaries of the five-year grant from the U.S. Department Education.

The grant has multiple objectives. One of the most important is to test whether placing full-time mentors for beginning teachers in the area's most needy schools will make a difference in raising student achievement.

Giving beginning teachers supportive full-time mentors - drawn from the ranks of the most experienced and best-trained teachers available - also will be a test of whether the best and brightest new teachers can be retained.

"Nationally, we lose 30 to 50 percent of all beginning teachers within the first five years," Dozier said, adding that the most academically able new teachers tend to be among the first to leave.

Each of the four participating school systems will be asked to provide matched pairs of their neediest schools based on the number of students receiving free and reduced-price lunch, high poverty rates and student achievement scores.

One of the matched-pair schools, selected at random, will get a full-time mentor for beginning teachers. The other school will serve as a control model.

"It will be set up like a medical experiment," Dozier said. "Some will get the medicine, and some won't."

At the end of the testing period, an evaluation will be performed to measure student achievement and teacher retention in high-need schools with a full-time mentor against those that did not have one.

If student achievement rises along with teacher retention, Dozier and her team will have strong evidence to take to the General Assembly to petition for full-time beginning-teacher mentors in needy schools throughout the state.

Altogether, 180 beginning teachers will receive intensive mentoring.

Another objective of the grant is to make certain that VCU students studying to be teachers know what they need to know.

One of the big problems for schools of education nationally is that aspiring elementary school teachers tend to be predominantly psychology majors.

At VCU, the problem is acute.

"Seventy percent of our students who go on to teach elementary school are psychology majors," Dozier said.

"I'm not saying there's anything wrong with a degree in psychology," she added. "But when you're asked to teach math, science, social studies and language arts, I'm not sure how a psychology major is going to help you be better prepared to do that."

In the years to come, VCU students studying to be elementary teachers will have less psychology and more of the core courses that they will be asked to teach when they have their own classrooms.

"We're going to see better-prepared teachers coming out of this institution, and that's going to translate into higher achievement for students," Dozier said.

Another way to help student teachers is to be certain that when they go out to practice teach, they are paired with great teachers.

Dozier said that does not always occur, because principals often will "arm-twist" reluctant or weak teachers to work with student teachers.

Using money from the federal grant, VCU's School of Education is aiming to train 100 exemplary teachers each year for the next five years specifically to work with the school's student teachers.

"We will be able to guarantee that all of our students will be placed with outstanding teachers," Dozier said.

Annually, VCU sends about 280 aspiring teachers into the field.

One area teacher who this past summer took instruction at VCU to be a mentor to student teachers believes nothing is more important than providing support for student teachers and beginning teachers.

Kitty MacBean, a library information specialist at Chamberlayne Elementary School in Henrico, is a national board-certified teacher with 30 years of teaching experience.

"Teaching in today's world is much more complex and more demanding," she said.

"Without increased training, we are in danger of not preparing young teachers for the rigors of the profession, and they will simply leave for greener and less stressful pastures."

She offered a quote from Italian writer and philosopher Luciano de Crescenzo: "We are each of us angels with only one wing, and we can only fly by embracing one another."

Contact Gary Robertson at (804) 649-6346 or grobertson@timesdispatch.com

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