Teacher Preparation Programs on the Honor Roll of the National Council on Teacher Quality. Source: National Council on Teacher Quality

Teacher Preparation Programs on the Honor Roll of the National Council on Teacher Quality. Source: National Council on Instructor Quality

California's teacher training programs were excoriated every bit among the worst in a nation of poor-quality programs in a study released Tuesday, immediately sparking a argue about the validity of the report'due south methodology and findings.

Nearly every teacher preparation program in California, at both public and private colleges and universities, received poor ratings in the report, which was issued past the National Council on Instructor Quality, a Washington, D.C., nonprofit. The report was published as a new educational rating category past U.S. News & World Report, which publishes widely followed rating lists whose methodologies have been criticized by some educators.

Of the 52 instructor credentialing programs offered at California Country Academy campuses, 20 received one star out of a possible iv, designating mediocre at best, while 24 were deemed and so weak they did non receive any stars at all and were instead tagged with yellow caution triangles, described in the written report every bit "consumer alerts." Academy of California campuses in Riverside, Santa Barbara and Santa Cruz each received one star for their programs in elementary educational activity.

Iii California programs scored well and fabricated the report's "honor ringlet," with the Academy of San Diego receiving 3½ stars for its program in secondary didactics and UC Berkeley and UC Irvine eachreceiving three stars for programs in secondary education.

More broadly, the report issues a scathing indictment of education schools across the United States. Teacher preparation is described as "an manufacture of mediocrity" that accepts applicants who generally are not loftier achievers and churns out get-go-year teachers grossly lacking in the classroom direction skills and content knowledge needed to serve students.

Students assigned to commencement-year teachers experience significant learning loss, said Julie Greenberg, senior policy analyst at the National Council on Teacher Quality. "More grievously, a high percentage of kids assigned to first-year teachers are poor and minority children in schools with high teacher turnover," Greenberg said. "If nosotros are going to close the achievement gap in this country, we are going have to go much more vigilant nigh the effectiveness of first-year teachers."

Methodology criticized

Many education leaders in California assailed both the methodology and the motivation behind the report.

"They really, really got it wrong," said Beverly Young, banana vice chancellor for bookish affairs at Cal State, which educates the vast majority of the country'due south teachers. "I call back it'south important that people empathize this work for what information technology is. It really is just a piece of work with a political agenda. Information technology's non a real study, information technology's non inquiry, but unfortunately it's existence presented that fashion."

Immature said the evaluation shows a misunderstanding of California's teacher preparation system. For case, she said the NCTQ gave simply 11 percent of California'due south programs top marks for the quality and depth of didactics in scientific discipline, engineering science, engineering and math courses – known as the STEM fields – compared to 35 percent nationwide.

The problem, Young said, is that California is the only state where teacher credentialing takes place in graduate schoolhouse. There'due south no undergraduate major in didactics. Past the time students are admitted to a program, they've already earned a bachelor's caste in whatsoever subject they programme to teach, and therefore information technology's inaccurate to conclude that students haven't received intense instruction in specific subjects.

The report'south authors said that the evaluation was based on whether the teacher preparation programs had systems in identify to accurately determine how much training prospective elementary teachers had accomplished in math, scientific discipline and other subjects. California does non accept those systems, they said.

Bill Lucia, president of Edvoice, a Sacramento-based education advocacy grouping that endorsed the report, acknowledged that the report probably didn't capture all the relevant information almost the land's instructor preparation programs. Simply he said that disparities in the quality of the programs are well-known.

"Teachers, schoolhouse superintendents, and principals know that not all CSU campuses' teacher prep programs produce the same quality and effectiveness of multiple-subject elementary and secondary credentialed teachers," Lucia said.

He added, "Ultimately it's well-nigh having adults finer prepared to serve children, so that school districts don't have to go to boggling lengths to retrain new teachers."

Linda Darling-Hammond

Linda Darling-Hammond

California does have some weak programs, acknowledged Stanford education professor Linda Darling-Hammond, chair of the California Committee on Instructor Credentialing, which accredits credential programs in the state. She also agrees that the standards used by the NCTQ are appropriate. The Council evaluated programs on 18 measures including classroom direction, lesson planning, quality of pupil educational activity and power to teach specific subjects. On their face, the standards are the right ones to examine, Darling-Hammond said. The problem with the study is how the data is nerveless and analyzed, she said.

The NCTQ based its evaluation on whether a topic appears on a piece of newspaper rather than how that topic is taught, Darling-Hammond said. For example, one university might cover a discipline with expert teachers modeling the lesson followed by students trying it out and so critiquing each other's work; while another schoolhouse might embrace information technology in a twenty-minute lecture. "But having a topic on a syllabus, or having a book listed, doesn't tell yous much about the quality of instruction," she said.

The teacher commission is also reevaluating the standards required to become a fully credentialed teacher, including whether the country's ane-year limit on the length of a teacher preparation program should be lifte d, every bit EdSource Today has previously reported.  It'southward an acknowledgement, said Darling-Hammond, that more time is needed to fit in courses that meet new expectations for teachers "in dealing with special education, English learners, technology, Common Core standards, child development, content educational activity, positive subject field, child mental health, and everything else we are asked to ensure that teachers learn."

Stanford University and CSU campuses were among some 700 colleges that refused to voluntarily participate in the evaluation because of what they described as serious flaws in the enquiry.

"The work of NCTQ has to-date been characterized by questionable research methodology, inappropriate tactics in data collection, and a lack of opportunity for institutions to right errors in data," wrote then-CSU Chancellor Charlie Reed, together with the chancellors of the Country University of New York and the University Organization of Maryland, in a February 2022 letter to the editor of U.S. News & World Study, explaining their reservations nigh the evaluation.

A top administrator at UC Santa Barbara'due south instructor education program compiled a thick listing of NCTQ'south inaccuracies in its review of that program including giving the school nil ratings for instruction on teaching English language learners and for student teaching fifty-fifty though they have a iv-course series devoted to the former and a full-twelvemonth, 1000-hour supervised program for the latter.

Kate Walsh, president of the National Council on Teacher Quality, said the report was a valuable service for applicants to education schools equally well equally schoolhouse districts and parents.

Walsh added that Search Soft Solutions, an Indiana-based visitor that provides employee hiring software and systems to some school districts in California and across the nation, would include the rating of the plan the candidate attended in the candidate's employment profile.

"Part of our motivation is to brand sure school districts are pressuring teacher grooming programs to deliver ameliorate teachers," Walsh said.

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