Are reformers reviving ‘reading wars’?
Mary Sullivan reads at Charles E. Beatley Jr. Central Library in 2012. (By Katherine Frey / The Washington Post)
In June a group called the National Council on Teacher Quality published ratings of teacher education schools that garnered a lot of attention — and a good deal of criticism. Why? The NCTQ wascreated by the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Foundation in 2000 in order to promote alternative teacher certification and try to diminish the influence of education schools. Its largely negative results were hardly unexpected. In this post, Stanford Professor Linda Darling-Hammond, an expert on teacher training, critiqued the NCTQ’s methodology and said the ratings did not reflect the work of ed schools:
NCTQ’s methodology is a paper review of published course requirements and course syllabi against a check list 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.
After taking some time this summer to review what the NCTQ produced, members of the Reading Hall of Fame, an honorary group founded in 1973 with the aim of contributing to the improvement of reading instruction, just issued their own statement (see below) about the ratings. In its report, the NCTQ made declarations about what books were and were not acceptable in literacy instruction, determinations with which the literacy experts are taking issue. A good number of books by Hall of Fame authors
