Perceptions of a college’s quality can be notoriously difficult to budge.
If a college is well known and expensive, such thinking goes, it must be good, while inexpensive options using lesser-known models like competency-based education offer a meager substitute for the traditional residential experience.
So what does it mean when a college that uses a competency-based model earns top marks in a national ranking?
In what many observers believe to be a first, Western Governors University’s competency-based teacher-education programs have landed at the top of new rankings in a report released on Tuesday by the National Council on Teacher Quality and published with U.S. News & World Report.
Competency-based models of education require students to demonstrate mastery of discrete tasks, or competencies, in order to progress in their studies. Competency-based courses are often offered online and aimed at adult students with work and family commitments. Such students often don’t have time to take traditional courses, which award credits on the basis of seat time.
Western Governors was one of 10 institutions in the country to have elementary- and secondary-education programs both score among the top programs in the council’s review. Its secondary-education program came in first.
“It’s a verification of the fact that competency-based programs, when they’re well thought-out and robust, are capable of achieving true excellence,” said Phil Schmidt, dean of Western Governors’ Teachers College.
The council’s ratings made their debut last year and sparked an uproar among colleges of education, which the council argued were part of an “industry of mediocrity.”
Critics lambasted last year’s report as flawed and methodologically weak. The council rated colleges in 18 categories, based on information from the colleges’ catalogs, websites, and syllabi; graduate and employer surveys; and student-teaching policies.
This year’s report evaluated 2,400 teacher-preparation programs at 1,127 institutions in the same 18 categories. Last year, 98 colleges cooperated with data-collection efforts. This year, 118 did so. Students and faculty members provided the council with most of the data, said Kate Walsh, the council’s president.
She acknowledged that the council ruffled feathers last year by adopting an oppositional stance. This year, Ms. Walsh said, it would take a more cooperative approach, though its conclusions remained grim. “The portrait of an ‘industry of mediocrity’ in last year’s first edition of the review remains accurate,” the report’s authors wrote.
‘Light Years Beyond’
Observations of future teachers’ classroom skills have been criticized as lacking rigor in the council’s reviews.
Western Governors’ policies and expectations for such observations earned praise, and were responsible for much of its success on this year’s rankings, said Julie Greenberg, a senior policy analyst for the council.
Western Governors’ students are required to be observed teaching five times. Most need six observations to demonstrate all the required competencies, said Mr. Schmidt, the dean.
The university also requires that the observations be conducted at least a week apart from one another, and it sets clear standards for the ratio of positive teacher comments to students relative to negative ones.
“It’s light years beyond what most programs have,” said Ms. Greenberg, describing the form Western Governors uses to conduct classroom observations. The council has posted the form on its website as a model.
Western Governors has “an extremely deep-seated, sincere, internally motivated interest in the type of training” the council values, Ms. Greenberg said. “I have to imagine there’s some there there.”
Mr. Schmidt sees such sentiments as evidence of changing attitudes toward competency-based education. A dozen years ago, he said, his institution’s model drew broad skepticism.
Accreditors had their doubts, too, said Clara M. Lovett, president emerita of Northern Arizona University and a founding trustee of Western Governors. “Things have moved a lot,” she said, though she didn’t think the council’s new ranking would necessarily change opinions drastically.
It may, however, persuade some people to take a closer look, she said. “A ranking like this may make people stop and say, ‘I know Western Governors is different; let’s find out what they’re doing,’” said Ms. Lovett, who serves on the council’s board.
She has also criticized prestige-driven rankings, like those by U.S. News, for ignoring community colleges, regional universities, and other institutions that she called “unsung heroes of higher education.” She celebrated the news about Western Governors, saying she had “jumped up and down” when she learned of it.
But the peculiarities of reputation mean that a top ranking will probably not have a big impact on a teacher-education program, said David W. Strauss, principal of the Arts & Science Group, a strategic-consulting firm serving higher education. Rankings and prestige loom large in determining the reputation and enrollment of professional programs like business and law. Teacher-education programs tend to be chosen on the basis of convenience and proximity.
An institution like Western Governors, which graduates about 2,000 teachers a year, also has other selling points, like flexibility, cost, and availability, said Mr. Strauss.
Ms. Walsh, of the council, doubted that the ranking would budge opinions, especially among the review’s most hostile critics.
“Because they view the review skeptically,” she said, “I imagine this isn’t going to change their opinion of Western Governors much.”
