69ý

Opinion
Teacher Preparation Opinion

We All Pay the Price for Bad Teacher Prep

By Kate Walsh — August 22, 2019 4 min read
BRIC ARCHIVE
  • Save to favorites
  • Print
Email Copy URL

Despite this being an age of information overload and listmania, there is remarkably little publicly available information about which of the nation’s 1,400-plus traditional teacher-prep institutions are doing a good job of preparing teachers. Aspiring teachers don’t know which programs will set them up to pass their state’s licensing tests or teach children how to read. Consequently, they unknowingly end up enrolling in programs where the odds are slim of qualifying for a state license.

And school districts design their teacher recruitment strategies based on their experiences with a few really great or really weak hires, rather than a careful analysis of how well a program’s graduates have performed.

Most surprising, given that states serve as the government regulators over educator-prep programs, many states fail to consider good, objective evidence in deciding if programs ought to continue to operate.

It’s not that the industry of teacher preparation is functioning just fine on its own, making such evidence of program quality superfluous. Most prep programs do such a poor job of readying candidates to pass a common licensure test that in many states, more than half of all . Compare this with nursing candidates, more than 85 percent of whom pass on their first attempt. Nearly two decades after the National 69ý Panel settled the science behind how children learn to read, only a third of the prep programs that the National Council on Teacher Quality surveyed actually teach that science. The shortcomings are deep, and they are real.

With so little quality control being exercised and so little information available, key decisions are about as random as a coin toss. And who’s paying the price? We all are—in lost student learning, turnover costs, and an erosion of respect for the profession.

The shortcomings are deep, and they are real.

This doesn’t mean no one’s tried to put out better data. Several years ago, CAEP—the largest accreditor of teacher-preparation programs—released new standards that raised the admission’s bar for teacher-prep programs. However, the organization soon scaled the standards back amidst a backlash against the more challenging entry requirements for programs.

A few states also tried to link teacher-prep programs to the value-added measures of their graduates’ effectiveness, but these efforts ultimately failed.

Even efforts by some states to make public some programs’ chronically low pass rates on licensing tests have been abandoned. The federal government took a turn at requiring states to collect better information through new teacher-prep regulations—but these were among the first rules the Trump administration .

Consequently, all we’re left with are the highly misleading Title II guidelines requiring that states report the licensure-test pass rates, but allowing institutions to define the criteria. For many programs, for instance, one criterion is to pass the licensing test. By not reporting on all the people who didn’t pass the test and therefore didn’t complete the program, these programs can accurately say that all their graduates passed their tests.

These attempts should not be the final chapter. Given the centrality of teacher quality to virtually all efforts to improve pre-K-12 education, good data on program performance is essential. In the words commonly attributed to management expert Peter Drucker, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.”

NCTQ is trying to fill some of this void, but we do so without the teeth of a government authority or even the professional pressure an internal authority might have. Instead, as a nonpartisan research and policy nonprofit, we want to contribute to the public good by simply making information available and useful to aspiring teachers and school districts that will hire them.

This year, we published the book Start Here to Become a Teacher to identify some of the top teacher-prep programs in the country and offer more general advice about what to consider when entering the teaching profession. We wrote this to inform aspiring teachers about which programs will teach them core skills, give them a strong student teaching experience, and situate them near districts with a salary that enables them to rent an apartment. Our Teacher Prep Review provides a searchable database of rankings for teacher-prep programs across the country. NCTQ also provide school districts with program performance data to help them find candidates who are likely to have learned the skills that make them ready on day one.

While our organization is proud of our efforts to bring transparency to teacher prep, we cannot and should not be doing this work alone.

We urge government policymakers and the teacher-prep field itself to take action. The federal government can revise Title II reporting requirements to require programs to provide more complete pass-rate data. States can use the approval process to gather information on whether programs are meeting the state’s standards and make these data available to the public. And districts should link data on teachers’ retention and performance back to their prep programs to target their recruitment efforts.

Everyone has a crucial role to play in sharing clear, actionable information that can strengthen future cohorts of teachers.

A version of this article appeared in the August 28, 2019 edition of Education Week as The Teacher-Prep Information Gap

Events

School & District Management Webinar Crafting Outcomes-Based Contracts That Work for Everyone
Discover the power of outcomes-based contracts and how they can drive student achievement.
This content is provided by our sponsor. It is not written by and does not necessarily reflect the views of Education Week's editorial staff.
Sponsor
School & District Management Webinar
Harnessing AI to Address Chronic Absenteeism in 69ý
Learn how AI can help your district improve student attendance and boost academic outcomes.
Content provided by 
School & District Management Webinar EdMarketer Quick Hit: What’s Trending among K-12 Leaders?
What issues are keeping K-12 leaders up at night? Join us for EdMarketer Quick Hit: What’s Trending among K-12 Leaders?

EdWeek Top School Jobs

Teacher Jobs
Search over ten thousand teaching jobs nationwide — elementary, middle, high school and more.
Principal Jobs
Find hundreds of jobs for principals, assistant principals, and other school leadership roles.
Administrator Jobs
Over a thousand district-level jobs: superintendents, directors, more.
Support Staff Jobs
Search thousands of jobs, from paraprofessionals to counselors and more.

Read Next

Teacher Preparation Q&A How This Teacher-Prep Program and District Aligned on the Science of 69ý
In Tennessee, a small network of schools and universities are aligning future teachers' coursework with evidence-based literacy practices.
8 min read
Illustration of two cliffs with a woman on one side and a man on the other. Both of them are holding a half of a cog wheel and bringing the two pieces together to bridge the gap between them.
iStock/Getty
Teacher Preparation Then & Now Why We Still Haven't Solved Teacher Shortages (Despite Decades of Trying)
The teacher-shortage discourse has a long history—and no perfect solutions.
6 min read
Conceptual image of drawing new graduates to the teaching workforce.
Laura Baker/Education Week via Canva
Teacher Preparation Opinion Ed. 69ý Face a Choice: Reform or Fade Away
If schools of education are to be revitalized, it will likely be red states leading the way, an education professor argues.
Robert Maranto
5 min read
Illustration of a college campus fading away.
Education Week + iStock
Teacher Preparation Democrats and Republicans Agree Teacher Prep Needs to Change. But How?
Teacher-prep programs "have been designed essentially to mass-produce identical educators," a dean said at a congressional hearing.
7 min read
A 1st grade teacher at Capital City Public Charter School leads a lesson about bee colonies with her students.
A 1st grade teacher at Capital City Public Charter School leads a lesson about bee colonies with her students. At Sept. 25 congressional hearing focused on the quality of the nation's teacher-preparation programs.
Allison Shelley for All4Ed