Teacher Colleges to be Graded
The U.S. News & World Report is planning on assessing more than 1,000 teachers colleges, grading them A through F. Many deans and schools are protesting this plan, saying that their methods are flawed and the scoring criteria is not clear. The project, which will be completed next year, will cost $3.6 million and is being supported by education foundations such as the Carnegie Corporation and the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation.
An editor of U.S. News, Brian Kelly, said “This is coming at a time when you have this tremendous national push for improvements in teacher quality: Who’s teaching the teachers?” The National Council of Teacher Quality is in charge of this proposed grading of education colleges, and the main purpose of which is to “provide school districts and other education consumers with more information about the training teacher-candidates receive.” As described on edweek.org , the council will rate teacher education programs on an A-F scale on up to 17 standards. These include whether teacher candidates are well trained in the areas of teaching and math, the length and quality of their field experiences, and whether the program includes training on how to work with English-language learners. In response to the criticisms, the council has put its scoring criteria on its website to be publicly accessible.
According to another article from edweek.org and NY Times, when the council first sent requests to education schools in January, at least two groups of deans objected with letters to U.S. News. One dean wrote, “The data-collection process must itself be transparent and clear, the assessments must be reliable, and the presentation of findings must be honest and fair. Without these characteristics, the rating will be meaningless.” The dean of the Steinhardt School of Education at New York University said, “Nobody’s against rankings, nobody’s against evaluation, nobody’s even against high-stakes evaluations. But if the methodology is flawed, how does that serve the public?”
In order to arrive at its ratings, the council will ask schools for detailed information about courses, textbooks, and admissions criteria. Some objections follow that the review is too focused on teacher preparation programs, with not enough focus on measuring what graduating teacher candidates have learned and can do effectively in the classroom. A representative group for the education schools made a statement that grading schools based on course descriptions and textbooks is like “evaluating the quality of restaurants by only requesting that menus be mailed to the evaluator — without sampling the food or visiting the site.”
President of the council Kate Walsh said that “short of sitting in on a college’s classes for a year,” her evaluation methods are sound. She explained “we’re asking folks to put that to the side and recognize what we all recognize, that there are many institutions in the U.S. not preparing teachers adequately, in addition to many doing a great job.” She also said that rating education schools will provide valuable for public schools for teacher recruitment.
The Dean of the education school at Rutgers University in New Jersey is still considering whether to take part in the review. “It’s unfortunate that this can be painted as shying away from evaluation,” he said. “But that’s not what it’s really about. You have to have judgment criteria that are clear and evidence everyone can see.”
February 13th, 2011 at 11:28 pm
Good, newsworthy topic – I wasn’t aware of this ranking project. It seems to be a good summary of the topic.
Be sure to proofread your posts. You have missing punctuation, like no period at end of first graf – and some careless stuff like a missing “the” here: “Dean of the education school at Rutgers University in New Jersey is still considering whether to take part in the review.”