In a 2000 national survey that studied the experiences of new teachers, the National Center for Education Statistics found that less than 50 percent of the participants received mentoring, even monthly interaction, and what they receive is extremely uneven.
Most programs do not have a detailed process for selecting mentors, nor do they invest significant time or money into training mentors on what activities or supports are most effective in training new teachers. Some provide mentor training, but it is rarely focused on specific strategies. Furthermore, most programs provide their mentors with only a nominal stipend and little, if any, release time. For these reasons, quality and content of mentoring vary based on a given mentor's individual teaching style, interest, and personality.
Most school districts -- especially those that serve high-need populations and hire the most new teachers -- have little capacity to train and mentor novices uniformly and unilaterally. In the absence of well-considered, adequately funded programs, new teachers are thrust into a classroom, assigned a nominal teacher "mentor" who has a full teaching load of his or her own, and perhaps invited to attend a support group for novice teachers, where participants meet at the end of a school day and often sit in a circle and wonder why they don't get the professional support they need.
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