Sometimes it seems that in our zeal to quantify and rate everything, almost nothing is good enough. Take teacher preparation programs at our colleges and universities. The National Council on Teacher Quality’s (NCTQ) recently released a national study on teacher prep programs that found “the vast majority of teacher preparation programs do not give aspiring teachers adequate return on their investment of time and tuition dollars.” More than three quarters of the more than 2,400 programs earned two or fewer stars out of a possible four. Connecticut took its lumps. Here, only Southern Connecticut State University’s graduate secondary school program received three stars. UConn only received one and a half and one star for its graduate secondary program and graduate elementary program, respectively. Elsewhere, other schools didn’t do so well either. Stanford University, Johns Hopkins University, and the University of Massachusetts, to name a few, all failed to reach the three star (honor roll) threshold.
But there was also pushback. For example, Linda Darling-Hammond, chair of the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing, blasted the NCTQ report in The Washington Post’s The Answer Sheet blog as being based on partial and often inaccurate information. She criticized NCTQ’s methodology that relied on “a paper review of published course requirements and course syllabi against a check list that does not consider the actual quality of instruction that the programs offer, evidence of what their students learn, or whether graduates can actually teach.” She noted that concerns about the study’s methodology led many schools to opt not to participate.
