In 2006 when Erskine Bowles gave his inaugural address as president of the University of North Carolina, he listed strengthening K-12 education in the state as a top priority. “Nothing is more important,” he said.

The UNC Tomorrow Commission, which recently laid out a presumed future for the university in its new report, does something similar. It stresses the need to improve K-12 education, although it now is called Birth to 20. “UNC should be more actively involved in solving North Carolina’s public education challenges,” the report says in a major finding.

It is possible that the emphasis on pre-college education is “mission creep” for the university. Or it could be a political opportunity in which Bowles sees a chance to become the “education czar” of North Carolina.

Equally valid is the view that the focus on K-12 stems from the confluence of two unhappy factors — seriously underperforming K-12 schools and University of North Carolina education schools that don’t teach teachers how to teach.

Both are serious flaws and Bowles is taking some steps to correct them. Most recently, the university sponsored a meeting of the UNC Board of Governors; the Community College Board; and the State Board of Education, which supervises K-12. Bowles wants to get the groups talking together.

Some of the problems in K-12 schools appear to stem from the training of teachers. In January, the Pope Center published a paper, “University of North Carolina Education Schools: Helping or Hindering Potential Teachers?” on the education schools in the UNC system. It was not flattering.

Education schools in the UNC system are more concerned with making children feel good about themselves than teaching them to read or do long division, said George Cunningham, a longtime education school professor in Kentucky. He examined UNC course descriptions; syllabi; and mission statements, known as “conceptual frameworks,” to come to that conclusion.

Cunningham argues that UNC schools’ commitment to “student-centered” learning or progressive education, as opposed to teacher-directed learning, has led them to minimize the actual imparting of skills and knowledge.
Poor teaching isn’t just the fault of the education schools. It is also the fault of the K-12 system. In his paper, Cunningham cites decisions by officials of the state Department of Public Instruction that promote ineffective instruction:

  • DPI “does not require memorization of the multiplication tables, teaching of the standard algorithm for long division, or multiplying and division of fractions,” he writes. Cunningham includes an example of long division in his paper for those who aren’t familiar with it.
  • DPI requires teachers to pass the PRAXIS licensure test; but PRAXIS devotes “such a small part of the test to the scientific principles of reading that a student could miss all of them and still pass the test.”
  • DPI requires education schools to meet the standards of the National Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education, which, Cunningham says, “is firmly in the grip of progressive education theorists.”

So what’s to be done? Bowles, whose solutions are driven by data, wants to find out which teacher education schools are providing good teachers. To evaluate the education schools, however, he needs the cooperation of the state’s K-12 system because that’s where most UNC education school graduates go.

Fortunately, the data he needs are, almost, within reach.
There is a method for measuring an individual student’s progress. It’s called the Education Value-Added Assessment System, provided by the SAS Institute and developed by William Sanders over many years at the University of Tennessee.

It differs from current assessment methods. These come up with group or class performance averages. Because these are distorted by the differing composition of each group or class, they cannot provide a consistent measurement of which teachers, programs, or schools are improving performance or holding it back.

Instead, the Education Value-Added Assessment System records an individual’s progress, or lack of it, from year to year. Tracking a student’s performance over time indicates what is working and what isn’t for each student. It provides a more accurate picture of the impact of the programs, schools, and teachers.

Once the effectiveness of teachers is measured, their success, or lack of it, can, at least theoretically, be used to assess the schools where they were trained.

So far, however, the assessment system is being used in only a few schools in North Carolina. The DPI doesn’t provide information to the university about where the graduates of education schools are teaching, nor about how well they are doing.

Presumably, it has a lot of this information, since each year it gives the university figures such as the 10 districts that hire the most graduates from each school.
If Bowles is successful in bringing the K-12 system and the UNC system together, he should be able to get the data. If he can, it will be a step toward identifying which education schools are producing the best graduates, those who can convey essential skills to the diverse group of students in today’s classrooms.

Jane S. Shaw is the executive vice president of the John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy.