An EdLaw Soup Guest Commentary by Arthur McKee, Managing Director of Teacher Preparation Studies, for the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ)
Sunday, March 13, 2011 at 12:20PM Special note from EdLaw Soup: It is difficult to seriously discuss systemic change, without considering all dimensions of a solution. As EdLaw Soup has been tracking changes on the horizon for our national education policies, we have attempted to provide a forum where one may consider diverse opinions. In this spirit, we offered the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) as well as the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education (AACTE), groups with ostensibly different policy positions, an opportunity to provide guest commentaries regarding the state of our educator preparation programs. We are very thankful for the NCTQ’s decision to respond to this offer. For background see Dueling Educational Policy Groups: Considering the Source and Educator Preparation Programs: The next step in turning schools around
Reviewing the Nation’s Schools of Education
By Arthur McKee, Managing Director of Teacher Preparation Studies, for the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ)
Imagine going to a law school that didn’t offer a class on contracts. Or attending a medical school that didn’t demand that its students learn human anatomy. All too often in today’s schools of education, the institutions that prepare 98,000 new public school teachers hired every year, candidates for the teaching profession aren’t learning what they need to be effective in the classroom. That’s why the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) has launched its review of over 1,000 education schools across the country. The “consumers” of teacher preparation – aspiring teachers, school districts, state regulators, and ultimately the parents of public school students – deserve to know which schools of education are doing a decent job, and which should be shunned or even shuttered.
In a profession like the law, a rigorous licensing exam such as the bar keeps law schools honest. The ABA and its state affiliates determine what new entrants to the profession need to know, and at what level of sophistication. A newly minted J.D. who had not been required to take the equivalent of a contracts course would have a devil of a time passing the bar (and would probably have a prima facie case that her law school had defrauded her!). And the ABA would eventually withdraw its accreditation of the law school, as its graduates pass rate on the bar slid below 75%. Unaccredited law schools exist, of course, but their graduates have a tough time on the market, and with good reason.
In teaching, licensing exams are administered by state governments. But by and large, in a classic case of regulatory capture, the bar for passing these exams is set at such a low level that virtually anyone can pass them. States still require that aspiring schools of education go to state approved teacher preparation programs (even most Teach For America corps members have to get a degree from an ed school), but most of their graduates get to become teachers regardless of what they haven’t learned. Licensing exams can’t be used to weed out poor schools of education, aspiring teachers have no reason to think the worse of the institutions they’re attending, and the cash cows that are the education schools keep producing.
Accreditation of education schools by a professional organization might rectify the situation. But teaching has no professional organization as such, and its unions are generally more concerned with bread and butter issues like pay and work rules than with standards of practice. So, once again, the schools of education neutered a process that might hold them accountable. The standards of the main accrediting body, the National Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE), are written so that almost all institutions can meet them. No wonder, then, that when Arthur Levine, president of Teachers College, the most reputable school of education in the country, took a look at accredited schools of education in 2006, he could find no difference between them and those that weren’t accredited. And while NCATE has recently pledged to re-engineer its accreditation process yet again, it’s not clear if the result will not be more of the same.
This is where NCTQ comes in. We’re a non-partisan, non-profit research and policy group working to ensure that every student has an effective teacher. Since schools of education are not only the main gateway into the profession, but are also the institutions charged with imparting the skills teachers need to be successful, their quality is obviously of prime importance – particularly to the more than 2 million students who are in the classrooms of new teachers. With neither state accountability nor national accreditation functioning properly, we decided to launch a review of the nation’s schools of education. We’ve partnered with U.S. News & World Report, which will publish the review in the fall of 2012.
The review looks at the fundamentals of teacher preparation program design. Are teacher preparation programs sufficiently selective – getting their candidates from the top half of the college going population, rather than the bottom third, as is often the case? Do they demand the coursework necessary so that the teachers will know the subjects they will teach? Do they teach the science of reading to elementary school teachers? And so forth (you can read through the review’s standards and indicators here.).
A review of this sort would not be very discriminating if the schools of education had themselves adequately standardized the courses of study they demanded of their candidates. But in our state field trials of the review in Texas and Illinois we found far too many programs which simply did not offer the basics. Not a single school of education in Texas, for example, made sure that its elementary teacher candidates had the breadth of knowledge necessary to handle the wide array of topics they would have to address in the classroom. In Illinois, half of the preparation programs for high school teachers didn’t offer a class in classroom management. Thus far, we’ve examined reading courses in 103 NCATE accredited schools of education. Only 38 teach the science of reading.
Readers of this blog have already gotten a taste of the response of the schools of education to our review. Let me just add that one of the most often repeated criticisms is that our review is too focused on inputs rather than outcomes. This is, in the short term, a very convenient defense, for, as the leaders of the schools of education themselves know all too well, the most germane outcome data – the impact ed school graduates have on their students’ achievement – simply does not exist in most states. And even if it did, it would not in and of itself be able to inform deans and policymakers what teacher preparation programs would need to do in order to get better results. For that, you would need an examination of the very inputs that we are examining in our review.
Still, we think outcomes are of crucial importance, so we are developing a standard by which we will rate schools of education by the value their graduates add to student learning in states, such as Tennessee, where the data is readily available. But we can’t help but wonder if our education school critics will come to regret their championing of outcomes as the sole means of determining teacher preparation quality. In the states that have reported out on the value added by teacher preparation programs, it has been programs like Teach For America and The New Teacher Project, whose choosiness makes up for highly abbreviated training, that come out on top. Given the uneven quality of teacher preparation programs, education schools’ insistence on focusing on outcomes instead of inputs – and, let’s be clear, a course of study at an education school is, by definition, nothing but a set of “inputs” – might needlessly discredit the whole notion of teacher preparation altogether.
