On Wednesday, a day after the Trump administration formally withdrew Obama-era rules that aimed to raise the bar for teacher training, a longtime critic of those programs released a report that found that many colleges are failing to prepare educators for today’s classrooms.
The report, the latest attempt by the National Council on Teacher Quality to rate teacher-prep programs, found that less than half of them provide aspiring teachers with a high quality practice-teaching experience, and only 44 percent evaluate them on their classroom-management skills. It also found widespread gaps in the preparation of science and social-studies teachers.
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On Wednesday, a day after the Trump administration formally withdrew Obama-era rules that aimed to raise the bar for teacher training, a longtime critic of those programs released a report that found that many colleges are failing to prepare educators for today’s classrooms.
The report, the latest attempt by the National Council on Teacher Quality to rate teacher-prep programs, found that less than half of them provide aspiring teachers with a high quality practice-teaching experience, and only 44 percent evaluate them on their classroom-management skills. It also found widespread gaps in the preparation of science and social-studies teachers.
“It has long been acknowledged that there are some fundamental problems with how we prepare teachers in the United States,” said Kate Walsh, president of the council.
But Ms. Walsh, who supported President Obama’s plan to hold the programs accountable for how many of their graduates get and keep jobs and how much graduates’ future students learn, says she’s not too discouraged by the recent repeal of the rules.
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“I never thought they were going to be a game-changer,” she said. “They were never going to turn this industry around.”
“The only way to get teacher-prep reform is to change the marketplace,” she continued. “Without rating programs, you’re not going to get higher ed to do anything differently.”
Other supporters of the now-defunct rules hope that reform will come from states like Tennessee, which rates programs on outcomes like teacher effectiveness, and Louisiana, which will soon require all students to complete a full-year classroom residency. And some reformers see promise in alternative certification programs like the Relay Graduate School of Education, a stand-alone graduate school with campuses in several states. Such teacher preparation “academies” recently became eligible to receive a share of federal teacher-quality funds, at states’ discretion.
Colleges and their accreditors, meanwhile, point to the growth of performance-based testing and the adoption of new accreditation standards as signs that they’re serious about self-improvement.
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But in the absence of a single federal standard, accountability for teacher-preparation programs remains a patchwork, with tremendous variation across states and schools. Alternative-certification programs have yet to prove themselves, and some critics say states have set a low bar for passing the new performance-based tests. It’s not yet clear if the new accreditation standards will compel colleges to change on their own.
Moving the Needle?
Teacher-prep programs have been under scrutiny for years, with policy makers and principals alike accusing them of lax admissions standards and poor candidate preparation. In a 2009 speech, former Secretary of Education Arne Duncan joined the chorus of critics, accusing teacher colleges of doing a “mediocre job” of equipping teachers for “the realities of the 21st-century classroom.”
In a speech at Columbia University’s Teachers College, he called on the programs to make student outcomes “the overarching mission that propels all their efforts.”
In the years that followed, the Obama administration worked to craft a set of controversial rules that would shift the focus of federal reporting requirements from inputs to outcomes. The rules directed states to submit new data on graduates’ job placement and retention, and rate programs on those measures as well. Most controversially, they required states to consider “student growth” among graduates’ future students in their program ratings, using measures like standardized test scores.
In the absence of a single federal standard, accountability for teacher-preparation programs remains a patchwork, with tremendous variation across states and schools.
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Under the rules, states could choose their own metrics and performance thresholds, and weight them as they wished, but only highly rated programs could receive federal Teach Grants, which provide prospective teachers with up to $4,000 a year in exchange for a commitment to serve in a high-need school.
Teacher unions and college lobbyists hated the rules, which they said would punish programs whose graduates are concentrated in high-need schools, where test scores tend to be lower and teacher turnover higher. The rules would discourage colleges from placing their students in such schools, those critics asserted. But the department forged ahead — slowly — publishing a final rule last October, just three months before President Trump took office. By March, the new president had signed a bill repealing the law. And this week, he formally rescinded it.
Still, some progress had been made. In 2012, the Council of Chief State School Officers released a report with 10 recommendations for how states could improve their teacher-preparation programs, and more than half of state leaders pledged to adopt them.
A year later, the profession’s accrediting body, the Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation, released new standards that mirrored several of the administration’s proposals.
“The threat of these federal regulations was enough to push many states and preparation programs to begin rethinking their approaches to preparing new teachers for the profession,” said Melissa Tooley, director of pre-K-12 educator quality for New America.
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Still, she said she’s “not aware of any evidence that these actions have really moved the needle on better preparing teachers across the board.”
That’s partly because the lack of federal rules means “no consistent, meaningful data collection on teacher-preparation outcomes,” and partly because “the incentives aren’t there,” she said. There are no penalties for states that fail to follow through on their promises to the Council of Chief State School Officers, and accreditation isn’t mandatory in most states. In fact, only about half of teacher-prep programs are accredited, Ms. Tooley said.
Last year, the school-officers council released a report that found that roughly half of states now regularly review the performance of their teacher-prep programs. But the states used a wide range of measures to do so — some of them of low quality — and many didn’t make their findings public, offering no way for prospective students to compare colleges.
Even so, some advocates see reason for optimism. Arthur Levine, president of the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation and a longtime critic of teacher colleges, said he’s getting more inquiries from governor’s offices about the foundation’s science, technology, engineering, and math program — an indication, perhaps, of “a growing appetite for change.”
Benjamin Riley, founder and executive director of Deans for Impact, a nonprofit group pushing for better state data systems and outcomes-based accountability for teacher colleges, says he’s seen “a tremendous amount of energy around thinking what we can do to strengthen the educator preparation system” — particularly surrounding residency programs like Louisiana’s.
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Mr. Riley is disappointed that President Trump overturned the Obama rule, because it “would have forced attention to be paid” to the issue. Still, he doesn’t see it as a huge setback for his group.
“We will have to start with a coalition of the willing, and that coalition is growing,” he said.
Striving for Self-Improvement
Meanwhile, teacher colleges and their accreditor are trying to prove they can reform themselves.
This fall, CAEP adopted standards that raised admissions requirements and compelled colleges to document how the teachers they prepare help elementary and secondary students learn. Programs that failed any of the five new standards are to be put on probation.
The new standards have divided teacher colleges, some of which have withdrawn from consideration for accreditation rather than be judged by them. Already, the accreditor has had to walk back its admissions standard, giving programs until college graduation to meet a requirement that cohorts of teacher candidates average a 3.0 GPA.
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The accreditor has also been forced to give programs more flexibility in meeting the student-learning standard, since most states don’t have data systems that can link student and teacher data back to specific programs.
Since 2015, 45 programs have withdrawn “for a variety of reasons,” according to Matt Vanover, a spokesman for the accreditor. Three programs, out of the 21 that have been reviewed under the new standards, have received probationary accreditation.
At the same time, some 600 programs have started using edTPA, a performance-based, subject-specific assessment designed to measure if aspiring teachers are ready for the classroom. The measure, which was developed by Stanford University, requires candidates to prepare a portfolio of materials that includes unedited video of them at work with students.
Twelve states have adopted the test for statewide use to license new teachers or approve programs.
Deborah A. Koolbeck, director of government relations at the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education, said the “profession is embracing performance assessment” as a tool to measure both candidate readiness and program performance.
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If traditional teacher-prep programs don’t prove they are preparing candidates for the classroom, they may see increased competition from alternative certifiers like the Relay Graduate School of Education, which focus more on real-world preparation, and less on theory.
Under the Every Student Succeeds Act, which President Obama signed into law in 2015, states can opt to set aside up to 2 percent of their federal teacher-quality funds to establish teacher-preparation “academies” that could operate outside of states’ usual rules and regulations for teacher prep. The plan is modeled on programs like Relay, which was founded by a network of charter schools a decade ago, and has placed aspiring teachers and residents in 350 schools in 24 states, according to its website.
“I think we’re going to see a greater push for innovation in the teacher-prep space,” said Michael Dannenberg, director of strategic initiatives for policy at Education Reform Now.
“Right now, it’s a completely opaque and unregulated marketplace,” said Mr. Dannenberg, who helped craft the Obama regulations when he was a senior policy adviser in the Education Department. “We need quality outcome data for both traditional and innovative programs to thrive.”
Kelly Field is a senior reporter covering federal higher-education policy. Contact her at kelly.field@chronicle.com. Or follow her on Twitter @kfieldCHE.
Kelly Field joined The Chronicle of Higher Education in 2004 and covered federal higher-education policy. She continues to write for The Chronicle on a freelance basis.