The research is clear: Teacher quality affects student learning more than any other school-based variable (issues such as income and parental education levels are external). And the impact of student achievement on economic competitiveness is equally clear. That’s why it’s so disturbing that in 2010, the SAT scores of students intending to pursue undergraduate education degrees ranked 25th out of 29 majors generally associated with four-year degree programs.
The test-scores of students seeking to enter graduate education programs are similarly low and, on average, undergraduate education majors score even lower than the graduate-education applicant pool as a whole. Education schools long have accepted under-qualified students, then offered them programs heavy on pedagogy and child development and light on subject-matter content. But steps are finally being taken to improve teacher-preparation programs and confront a problem that has for too long largely been met with denial.
The University of Central Florida (UCF), the state’s largest producer of teachers, exemplifies what’s wrong with much of our system of teacher preparation. The Hechinger Report found that that only six of UCF’s 65 programs gave out a higher percentage of As and A-minuses than the School of Teaching, Learning and Leadership. Between the fall of 2011 and the summer of 2012, 73 percent of the grades the school awarded were As or A-minuses. Compare that to electrical engineering, where such high marks accounted for 34 percent of grades, or the 40 percent of grades in the A-range in food services and lodging management.
In an email response, the university’s spokesperson dutifully wrote that if faculty members do their jobs well, “every future teacher demonstrates their competencies to the highest level and graduates with the knowledge and skills to become a highly effective classroom teacher.” It’s like Lake Wobegon: Everybody is above average.
But the fog of denial is beginning to lift. The American Federation of Teachers has proposed the equivalent of a bar exam that would require prospective teachers to demonstrate knowledge of their academic subjects and spend a year in “clinical practice” before sitting for the exam. The plan calls for education schools to raise their standards by requiring a minimum 3.0 grade-point average both to enroll and to graduate.
More coverage
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- The trouble with NCTQ’s ratings of teacher-prep programs
- California struggles to assess teacher training programs
- Do new exams produce better teachers? States act while educators debate
- Alternative routes to teaching become more popular despite lack of evidence
Meanwhile, the Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation has proposed controversial new standards that would require teacher-education programs to prove that their graduates are raising their students’ test-scores.
And it looks like UCF’s teacher-preparation program will have to step up its game. Florida is developing a rating system for education schools that covers six areas, including student achievement and graduate employment and retention.
Making education schools accountable for the quality of their graduates goes hand-in-hand with holding the graduates of those schools to higher standards when they seek to move into the classroom. The Massachusetts Tests for Educator Licensure are far more rigorous than most of their counterparts in other states. When the Massachusetts tests were first administered in 1998, 59 percent of teacher candidates failed. Chaos ensued, but Bay State leaders didn’t back down, and seven years later Massachusetts’ public-school students began a streak—still intact—of finishing first in every test and on every grade-level in the National Assessment of Educational Progress, also known as the Nation’s Report Card.
Culture change comes neither quickly nor easily. But given the link between teacher quality and student achievement in the larger context of a hyper-competitive global economy, it is a battle that must be fought. American teacher-preparation programs desperately need to move from a Lake Wobegon culture to one focused on excellence. Thankfully, it seems that this belated transformation is well under way.
Charles Chieppo is a research fellow at the Ash Center of the Harvard Kennedy School and the principal of Chieppo Strategies, a public policy writing and advocacy firm.
A version of this piece appeared on the Better, Faster, Cheaper blog.
The critical center of this piece is based on moronic assumptions that are make all of this pointless. The research ISN’T clear that teacher quality affects student learning. What precisely constitutes a realistic appraisal of quality? When SAT scores are then quoted as evidence of education majors’ ineptitude this is another indication of the writer’s own inability to look at this with real intelligence. What exactly are the SAT’S predictive of beyond how a student will do in their first year of college? They certainly don’t gauge whether a student will graduate, and for sure say nothing about how a student will do outside of college (unless they are going to med school or law school).
This is just another absurd and pointless essay that claims much based on nothing but unproven assumption not backed by real research.
Shame on you all for publishing this rot.
According to the author of this article, “the SAT scores of students intending to pursue undergraduate education degrees ranked 25th out of 29 majors generally associated with four-year degree programs.” This statistic is misleading, considering the fact that SAT scores are not indicative of what’s academically necessary for success in a teacher prep. program. Furthermore, to simply suggest that the answer to our educational woes in America is improved teacher quality, is to offer what’s already been proven to be misplaced cogency.
Most teacher prep. programs are heavy on the social sciences and focus on pedagogy or teacher methodology the second half of the program. Students scoring higher on the SAT in the areas of math and science will typically choose an entirely different educational route and end up in a technical field. That’s because these students have a mind for math and science, and they tend to feel more comfortable working with numbers and data than with people. The teacher preparation program requires its students to be good at working with people, focusing on the subtleties and complexities of human interactions. Ask most parents what type of college graduate they want working with their children, and I believe the answer would be the type that’s better at working with kids rather than numbers.
I agree with the author of this article when he states that, “Culture change comes neither quickly nor easily.” And that change “is a battle that must be fought.” However, to point a finger at any one aspect of our public education system, including our teacher prep. programs, is to wage war against the American culture itself. According to Princeton professor Cornel West, “those countries with the best education systems in the world, like Finland, have over 90% of their teachers unionized, and their students take few, if any standardized tests. In Finland there are 2 teachers in classrooms of 14. Teachers receive the salaries of many of our businesspeople. 15% of their college graduates teach in schools rather than make their way to Wall Street to be millionaires. They reflect a fundamentally different set of priorities in America. And if we don’t adapt to those priorities, we will continue to scapegoat, demonize & thereby undercut the morale of our teachers.” I agree with the fine professor. America has a different set of priorities. It’s willing only to place more blame on an already beaten-down group of people, rather than place cogency in an area of real concern. That is, how our society has been dealing with the steady decline of social capital.
You said that teacher quality affects student learning more than any other school-based variable. I’m concerned regarding this as a recent study shows that there is a relationship between the amount of the salary of teachers and the results they achieve with their students on tests of knowledge.
So if you want better quality, than as always, money should play a vital role and thus the Government is closely related to this task.
good luck