A new report from the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) examines the quality of 875 undergraduate preparation programs for elementary teachers. While some gains are visible since NCTQ’s 2014 report, teachers emerging from most of these programs are still ill-prepared to enter the classroom.
Reviewers scrutinized programs in 396 public and 479 private colleges and universities in D.C. and all fifty states, programs enrolling anywhere from a handful of prospective teachers to 1,700. They used an A–F grading system to rank programs based on three criteria: admissions (selection criteria), knowledge (coverage of early reading, math, and other content), and practice (student teaching, with a focus on classroom management). They also analyzed each program’s foundational materials, including syllabi, course textbooks, and observation forms. And they employed additional research, international comparisons, and consultation from experts on teaching practice.
Reviewers find that programs are somewhat more selective than they were in 2014. NCTQ has shown before a correlation between program selectivity and teacher effectiveness. Yet only 26 percent of programs draw most of their applicants from the top-half of the college-bound population (based on the GPA or SAT/ACT score required by the program to enroll). And a measly 13 percent are both selective and demographically diverse, showing that such a combination is worryingly rare.
Likewise, instructional quality was lacking. Only thirty-nine percent of programs improved the quality of their early reading instruction since the earlier report, when gauged on five measures: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension—all of which NCTQ believes underlie K–5 student learning in other content areas. And math was even worse. Just 13 percent of teacher preparation programs adequately covered topics like geometry, numbers and operations, algebra, and data analysis—areas that research and experts say are necessary for effective math instruction in the elementary grades.
In the realm of classroom management, just 42 percent of programs give quality feedback to teachers. As any current or former teacher knows, successfully managing the classroom is vital for effective educating.
Worst of all was content coverage. Only 5 percent of programs taught future educators all the essential content knowledge in science, geography, history, literature, and composition—a disaster for elementary teachers, whose curricula usually cover all of these core subjects.
The review does not, of course, examine every facet of teacher preparation programs, but it covers the “crucial basic elements” that teachers need to succeed. Through its wide-range of evaluation criteria and in-depth review of coursework, the report presents a solid analysis.
The big takeaway is that teachers are generally not receiving the necessary training and support that they will need to succeed in elementary classrooms. Stakeholders at a school, district and state level—and even high-school seniors—ought therefore use this report to dig deep into the quality of a given teaching preparation program before they sign up and start paying tuition.
SOURCE: “Landscapes in Teacher Prep: Undergraduate Elementary Ed,” NCTQ (December 2016).
