National Council on Teacher Quality report is deeply flawed - by Linda Darling-Hammond / commentary
by Linda Darling-Hammond / commentary
This week, the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) issued a report, NCTQ Teacher Prep Review. Billed as a consumer’s guide, the report rates teacher preparation programs on a list of criteria ranging from selection and content preparation to coursework and student teaching aimed at the development of teaching skills. While the report appropriately focuses on these aspects of teacher education, it does not, unfortunately, accurately reflect the work of teacher education programs in California or nationally.
NCTQ’s methodology is a paper review of published course requirements and course syllabi against a checklist that does not consider the actual quality of instruction that the programs offer, evidence of what their students learn or whether graduates can actually teach. Concerns about the organization’s methods led most schools of education nationally and in California to decline to participate in the data collection. (NCTQ’s website indicated that fewer than 1 percent of programs in the country “fully cooperated” with the study.) NCTQ collected documents through websites and public records requests. The ratings published in this report are, thus, based on partial and often inaccurate data, and fail to evaluate teacher education quality.
The indicators used to measure the criteria often fail to identify the aspects of practice that are most important or
