Universities across the nation were sharply rebuked for shoddy teacher training in a massive report put out Tuesday by the National Council on Teacher Quality.
Dubbed “unprecedented” by the council, the report surveyed 1,130 colleges’ and universities’ teacher training programs and concluded they represent “an industry of mediocrity.”
“(They churn) out first-year teachers with classroom management skills and content
knowledge inadequate to thrive in classrooms with ever-increasing ethnic and socioeconomic student diversity,” the report stated. “The evaluations provide clear and convincing evidence … that a vast majority of teacher preparation programs do not give aspiring teachers adequate return on their investment of time and tuition dollars.”
The 112-page report highlights problems such as:
* Regarding STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) preparation, a critical area for our nation, some 70 percent of undergraduate elementary programs do not require teacher candidates to take even a single science course.
* As we consistently found in most standards, graduate programs overlook the content knowledge, or lack thereof, of incoming candidates, offering one-year programs regardless of content knowledge deficits.
*Classroom management is a skill few novice teachers possess.
* It is far too easy to get into a teacher preparation program. Just over a quarter of programs restrict admissions to students in the top half of their class, compared with the highest-performing countries, which limit entry to the top third.
* Fewer than one in nine elementary programs and just over one-third of high school programs are preparing candidates in content at the level necessary to teach the new Common Core State Standards now being implemented in classrooms in 45 states and the District of Columbia.
The only four colleges to pass muster with the council are Furman, Lipscomb, Ohio State and Vanderbilt universities. Of the 1,200 higher education programs the council ranked, about one in seven earned less than one star on its four-star rating system. Many listed are state-run schools.
The report is described as a “consumer tool” of sorts, a way to allow potential students a chance to study at the highest-ranked campuses. It also offers solutions for schools to improve their performance.
The Washington, D.C.-based National Council on Teacher Quality is a bipartisan advocacy group.
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IMAGE: Screenshot, National Council on Teacher Quality website
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