NCTQ Ranking of Teacher Prep Programs Gets an F
Background
In January, 2011, the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) and U.S. News & World Report announced their intention to evaluate and rank teacher education programs in the United States. The goal of this study is to review the quality of teacher preparation programs across the U.S., based on NCTQ’s standards for teacher education. This followed a series of reports assessing state-level Teacher Preparation policies across the nation.Because there are at least 1,400 university-based teacher preparation programs in the US, NCTQ relied on two methods to assess the practices of teacher preparation programs and the content in the courses offered by the teacher preparation programs. The first method was to ask preparation program representatives to respond to queries from NCTQ about programs. The second method was to collect and analyze the syllabi from the courses taken by students in teacher preparation programs.
The purpose of this blog is to examine the effort by NCTQ to evaluate, judge, and rank university-based teacher preparation programs. My comments are separated into five sections: (1) Inputs versus outputs; (2) Lack of research foundation; (2) Methodology employed; (3) Alternative programs ignored; (4) Superintendent critiques;