Columnist and author Thomas Sowell once was asked, “If you could snap your fingers and make one big change in the country, what would give you the most satisfaction?” He replied: “Do away with schools of education and departments of education. Close them down.”
North Carolina’s colleges of education have not been immune from such criticism. A 2010 study commissioned by former UNC system President Erskine Bowles found that Teach for America teachers, who before entering the classroom receive a modest amount of training — and not by colleges of education — ran rings around education school graduates. This suggests substantial room for improvement.
The journalists at U.S. News and World Report and the nonprofit education reform group the National Council on Teacher Quality also see room for improvement in our nation’s education colleges. They have teamed up to develop a system for rating teacher preparation programs.
But schools of education are fleeing the ratings like water in the Red Sea before the staff of Moses.
In February, 37 education school deans, presidents, and directors sent a public protest letter to U.S. News & World Report editor Brian Kelly. Representing schools such as Columbia, Harvard, and Ohio State, they expressed discontent with a number of the project’s components, such as NCTQ’s unwillingness to disclose the precise details of how schools will be scored.
The turmoil heated up again in April when four state public university systems — New York, Wisconsin, Georgia, and Kentucky — announced that they would refuse to participate voluntarily.
The education college leaders claimed that sufficient standards of quality, primarily the Interstate Teacher Assessment and Support Consortium, already exist. The National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education, the major accrediting body for colleges of education, relies heavily on these standards in the accreditation process.
NCTQ President Kate Walsh remains unimpressed: “[I]f these standards, first developed in 1992, were going to have a major impact on the field of teacher preparation, they would have done so by now,” she wrote in a letter responding to the criticism.
Arthur McKee, director of the U.S. News/NCTQ project, concurred, saying current accountability methods are failing. Accreditation of schools of education is “being done almost entirely by autopilot,” he said, referring to a lack of scrutiny.
U.S. News is scheduled to publish results of the review, developed and implemented by NCTQ, in the fall of 2012.
In the review, schools will not be ranked as in other U.S. News comparisons, but assigned a letter grade (A, B, C, D, or F) based on 17 standards. For each standard, one or more indicators will clarify how a school can meet that standard. For example, a student teacher must be “observed at least five times at regular intervals during the semester” to satisfy the standard for student teaching. How each standard and indicator will be scored, however, has not been released.
One of NCTQ’s primary areas of focus will be determining whether elementary education programs are teaching the most effective methods of reading instruction. Sometimes called the “science of reading,” these methods focus on phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension strategies. Many schools of education still avoid using them.
In response to uncooperative public colleges, NCTQ officials say they will use open records laws to obtain the documents they seek, such as student-teacher manuals. For uncooperative private schools, such as Wake Forest University’s education department, where public records laws don’t apply, reviewers will make an estimate based on available data. “The review is most definitely going to proceed,” McKee said.
Though controversial, many reformers see the review as a step in the right direction. “If it accomplishes nothing else,” offered John Stone, president of the Education Consumers Foundation, “the U.S. News/National Council for Teacher Quality rankings will shine a much-needed light on what colleges of education are doing.”
Duke Cheston is a contributor to Carolina Journal.