Problems with new ratings of teachers colleges, point by point
It was big news this week when a conservative organization called the National Council on Teacher Quality released ratings of teacher preparation programs at colleges and universities and essentially slammed nearly all of them as being subpar. While there certainly a good number of ineffective teacher prep programs, it would be hard to know which ones from the council’s ratings because of its flawed methodology, quickly exposed by many educators. They include teacher education expert Linda Darling-Hammond of Stanford University in this Answer Sheet post. (You can read some others here, here and here.)The council, which was founded in 2000 by the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Foundation and is funded by organizations that promote a corporate-influenced school reform agenda, quickly responded to the criticism. It sent an e-mail about Darling-Hammond’s piece with specific points of contention. In the following post, Darling-Hammond takes up each one and explains why she wrote what she wrote. After her