Despite this being an age of information overload and listmania, there is remarkably little publicly available information about which of the nation鈥檚 1,400-plus traditional teacher-prep institutions are doing a good job of preparing teachers. Aspiring teachers don鈥檛 know which programs will set them up to pass their state鈥檚 licensing tests or teach children how to read. Consequently, they unknowingly end up enrolling in programs where the odds are slim of qualifying for a state license.
And school districts design their teacher recruitment strategies based on their experiences with a few really great or really weak hires, rather than a careful analysis of how well a program鈥檚 graduates have performed.
Most surprising, given that states serve as the government regulators over educator-prep programs, many states fail to consider good, objective evidence in deciding if programs ought to continue to operate.
It鈥檚 not that the industry of teacher preparation is functioning just fine on its own, making such evidence of program quality superfluous. Most prep programs do such a poor job of readying candidates to pass a common licensure test that in many states, more than half of all . Compare this with nursing candidates, more than 85 percent of whom pass on their first attempt. Nearly two decades after the National Reading Panel settled the science behind how children learn to read, only a third of the prep programs that the National Council on Teacher Quality surveyed actually teach that science. The shortcomings are deep, and they are real.
With so little quality control being exercised and so little information available, key decisions are about as random as a coin toss. And who鈥檚 paying the price? We all are鈥攊n lost student learning, turnover costs, and an erosion of respect for the profession.
The shortcomings are deep, and they are real.
This doesn鈥檛 mean no one鈥檚 tried to put out better data. Several years ago, CAEP鈥攖he largest accreditor of teacher-preparation programs鈥攔eleased new standards that raised the admission鈥檚 bar for teacher-prep programs. However, the organization soon scaled the standards back amidst a backlash against the more challenging entry requirements for programs.
A few states also tried to link teacher-prep programs to the value-added measures of their graduates鈥� effectiveness, but these efforts ultimately failed.
Even efforts by some states to make public some programs鈥� chronically low pass rates on licensing tests have been abandoned. The federal government took a turn at requiring states to collect better information through new teacher-prep regulations鈥攂ut these were among the first rules the Trump administration .
Consequently, all we鈥檙e left with are the highly misleading Title II guidelines requiring that states report the licensure-test pass rates, but allowing institutions to define the criteria. For many programs, for instance, one criterion is to pass the licensing test. By not reporting on all the people who didn鈥檛 pass the test and therefore didn鈥檛 complete the program, these programs can accurately say that all their graduates passed their tests.
These attempts should not be the final chapter. Given the centrality of teacher quality to virtually all efforts to improve pre-K-12 education, good data on program performance is essential. In the words commonly attributed to management expert Peter Drucker, 鈥淚f you can鈥檛 measure it, you can鈥檛 improve it.鈥�
NCTQ is trying to fill some of this void, but we do so without the teeth of a government authority or even the professional pressure an internal authority might have. Instead, as a nonpartisan research and policy nonprofit, we want to contribute to the public good by simply making information available and useful to aspiring teachers and school districts that will hire them.
This year, we published the book Start Here to Become a Teacher to identify some of the top teacher-prep programs in the country and offer more general advice about what to consider when entering the teaching profession. We wrote this to inform aspiring teachers about which programs will teach them core skills, give them a strong student teaching experience, and situate them near districts with a salary that enables them to rent an apartment. Our Teacher Prep Review provides a searchable database of rankings for teacher-prep programs across the country. NCTQ also provide school districts with program performance data to help them find candidates who are likely to have learned the skills that make them ready on day one.
While our organization is proud of our efforts to bring transparency to teacher prep, we cannot and should not be doing this work alone.
We urge government policymakers and the teacher-prep field itself to take action. The federal government can revise Title II reporting requirements to require programs to provide more complete pass-rate data. States can use the approval process to gather information on whether programs are meeting the state鈥檚 standards and make these data available to the public. And districts should link data on teachers鈥� retention and performance back to their prep programs to target their recruitment efforts.
Everyone has a crucial role to play in sharing clear, actionable information that can strengthen future cohorts of teachers.
