A five-year study of teacher-preparation programs strongly recommends more research into teacher preparation and accreditation, saying that not enough data are available to draw conclusions about the characteristics of the nation's most effective teacher-preparation programs.
But the study, directed by the National Research Council, sponsored by the U.S. Education Department's Institute of Education Sciences, and released on Thursday morning, did conclude that few substantial differences separate traditional routes to teaching through colleges of education and alternative routes to teacher certification, such as Teach for America.
The contrast has been a subject of debate as President Obama and Congress seek to renew the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, known as No Child Left Behind under President George W. Bush.
The study was released on the same day the National Council on Teacher Quality issued a scathing critique of teacher -education programs in Texas.
When it began their study, in 2005, the National Research Council intended to examine students who entered teacher-preparation programs and to evaluate the instruction and experience they received. But the lack of comprehensive data made the task "exceptionally difficult," the committee of education professors and others who conducted the study wrote in their report, "Preparing Teachers: Building Evidence for Sound Policy."
"We were surprised by how poor the data are, and concerned about it," said the panel's chairwoman, Ellen C. Lagemann, who is a research professor at Bard College's Levy Economics Institute and a historian of education.
The study identified factors that seem to be important in producing good teachers, such as the selectivity of teacher-preparation programs, but the authors could not explain why those factors mattered, because the research was so scant, she said.
Converging Routes?
One of the study's few firm conclusions was about the lack of substantial differences between earning a bachelor's or master's degree at a college of education and getting credentials to teach through programs like Teach for America, which allow students who did not major in education to quickly get teaching certification.
"There's a lot of talk out there about alternative routes into teaching being very different from traditional routes, and we found that that distinction just is not meaningful," Ms. Lagemann said. Colleges of education vary widely in their methods, and many alternative-certification programs require participants to take classes at colleges and universities, she pointed out. In some cases, students pursuing a traditional education degree and students in an alternative-certification program are in the same class.
President Obama, as part of his plan to renew the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, has proposed putting colleges of education in competition with alternative programs when seeking grants, a move that has drawn criticism from some people in higher education, who say that alternative programs do not focus enough on pedagogy.
"There are more differences between programs in the same route than there are differences across them," Ms. Lagemann said.
The committee's report recommends the creation of a comprehensive data-collection system to track teachers from their college training through their careers, in an effort to identify successful teachers and compare teacher-training methods. The system could be built on data that states already collect, Ms. Lagemann said, as long as states cooperated so the tracking crossed state lines.
The committee also recommends improving accreditation as a possible way to improve teacher education. Its report asks the Education Department to study the approval and accreditation of teacher-preparation programs. The current system is a "patchwork of mandatory and voluntary processes," the committee wrote, that provides little accountability or evidence of effective practices.
Comments
1. reinking - April 30, 2010 at 07:49 am
The report in question is an assessment of teacher education programs. Yet, there is no explicit attention to the core concepts of assessment: validity and reliability. Further, there is no literature review establishing a basis for what comprises an appropriate and effective teacher education program and many key assertions in the report are unsupported by citations from the teacher education literature. The report was apparently not peer reviewed, being published by its authors and their sponsoring agency, not by a reputable journal. There is also evidence that those conducting this report subscribe to a contentious, narrow view of reading and how it should be taught (e.g., note the evaluation of core and supplemental texts in the appendices). Participation in the reported assessment was also limited for principled reasons as noted in the appendices, which include correspondence with the Texas Association of Colleges of Teacher Education. Readers of the report should consider these issues when drawing any conclusions based on the report.
David Reinking
Eugene T. Moore Professor of Education
Clemson University
Past-Editor, Reading Research Quarterly
Past-Editor,Journal of Literacy Research
President, Literacy Research Association
(formerly the National Reading Conference)
2. gussguss - April 30, 2010 at 08:45 am
Teaching is art not science. You can develop the skills of an artist, you train a scientist.
3. lnickles - April 30, 2010 at 10:12 am
Based on what article in the constitution is power granted to the federal government to mandate a nation wide data tracking system?
4. lnickles - April 30, 2010 at 10:13 am
(hit submit too early) ...for this purpose?
5. intered - April 30, 2010 at 11:01 am
I agree with Reinking. Higher Education is seen by interested outsiders as sporting a number of hypocritical postures. Among the most blatant:
- Teaching program evaluation but refusing to train these methods on institutional effectiveness.
- Teaching the sciences while refusing to incorporate the last 50 years of learning sciences in one's teaching behavior.
- Teaching measurement sciences while assessing student achievement with provably invalid instruments that were scientifically supplanted in the 1960's or before.
- Teaching marketing, merchandising, etc. while ignoring students needs in how programs are developed and delivered.
- Teaching production management but needlessly taking years upon years to get new degrees to market.
- Teaching object-oriented methods for managing and scaling knowledge objects but refusing to apply this knowledge to curriculum development and management where it would improve the quality of learning while reducing time-to-proficiency.
- Teaching any number of modern technologies and scientific foundations to improve productivity while failing to notice our 50 year decline in productivity (credits and degrees out for dollars in).
. . . and my favorite:
- Teaching supply chain management while being incapable of practicing it as applied to class scheduling, the result being that students pay tens of thousands of dollars in job opportunity costs and additional tuition.
Left to our insular devices, and absent any real external auditing, we have evolved to find no thought too liberal to embrace, and no action toward self-improvement too conservative to reject.
6. willismg - May 01, 2010 at 06:54 am
The education of our youth is much too important to be left in the hands of people who majored in something as vacuous as Education. Part of the problem is that the Schools of Education are manned by professors who have themselves come to believe their own bullsh*t. Just one former Scientist/Engineer/High School Teacher's humble opinion.
7. abichel - May 03, 2010 at 12:41 pm
Colleges of Education have long been running jokes on most campuses where they are found, so this is hardly news. Nor is it news in the context of the role of teaching within higher education - which is also widely regarded as a joke at numerous institutions. Should we be surprised that institutions that devalue teaching are incapable of producing effective teachers? I think not. Better instruction across the curriculum is what is needed to produce better teachers.