#nctq

Educators (and those who love them): Please be aware that a report will be released soon from the National Council on Teacher Quality. I'm pasting their press release here so that you'll recognize them: <http://us1.campaign-archive2.com/?u=c9b11da2ceffae94e1dc196f6&id=7027513396&e=1bd3877e7c>

It's a "reform-minded" organization, which is code for, it is part of the movement to discredit public schooling and traditional teacher education. While not all public schools, and not all traditional teacher ed. programs, are excellent, this is a biased report.

The fact remains that *most* traditional teacher education programs are better than most alternative certification programs purely because of the longer and more intensive preparation the traditional programs provide. Two years beats one year; 120 hours of field experiences in a variety of settings *prior* to student teaching beats a year of student teaching shoved in with a bunch of coursework.

Resisting the National Council on Teacher Quality’s Propaganda

The National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) has published in recent review of teacher preparation.  The NCTQ is well-financed (Gates, Walton, Broad, New Ventures Fund, and many more), and the Fordham Foundation’s creation.  Together, their goal is destroy teacher prep by convincing the nation that teacher preparation in the nations public and private colleges is failing.  And to prove it,…

The teacher education programs at USD, Northern State and Dakota State are the best in the state, according to a review released today by the National Council on Teacher Quality.

At each school, the elementary ed programs received 2 stars and the secondary ed programs 3 stars.

SDSU got just 1 star for elementary ed and 2.5 for secondary ed.

Black Hills State got 1 star for elementary ed and 1.5 for secondary ed.

The rest of South Dakota's teacher prep programs were not rated or received a partial review.

The 3-star ratings for USD, NSU and DSU are impressive. Only 14 percent of all secondary ed programs in the nation performed at least as well.

One thing NCTQ would like to see South Dakota do is link student test scores to individual teachers. Once we do, we can see evaluate the on-the-job effectiveness of teacher ed graduates from particular schools.

USD is working on that as part of its Bush Foundation grant, but it's a couple years away. Using quantitative measures like student test scores to evaluate teachers is something the NCTQ feels strongly about.

There's no perfect way to determine which schools do the best job of preparing teachers for their careers, and plenty of folks are criticizing the NCTQ's methodology for today's report. Here's how NCTQ explains it:

NCTQ takes an in-depth look at admissions standards, course requirements, course syllabi, textbooks, capstone projects, student teaching manuals and graduate surveys, among other sources, as blueprints for training teachers. We apply specific and measurable standards that identify the teacher preparation programs most likely to get the best outcomes for their students. To develop these standards, we consulted with international and domestic experts on teacher education, faculty and deans from schools of education, statistical experts and PK-12 leaders. We honed our methodology in ten pilot studies conducted over eight years.

As I've written, the South Dakota Board of Regents publishes a yearly report on the quality of its teacher prep programs using different criteria. USD and SDSU performed the best in their most recent reviews.