In Defense of Teacher Educators

This blog is intended to build on arguments I made in my recently published book, Preparing the Nation's Teachers to Teach Reading: A Manifesto in Defense of "Teacher Educators like me." In this volume, I took on the various reports of the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) which claim to show that US colleges of education are doing a poor job of preparing teachers to teach early reading. This conclusion is based upon NCTQ's review of course syllabi and textbooks in reading methods courses in teacher preparation programs across the US. Specifically, NCTQ concluded that teacher educators are failing to address the fundamental areas of reading identified by the National Reading Panel. The NCTQ did find, however, that schools of education in some states were adequately preparing future teachers to teach reading. All of the teacher preparation programs reviewed in the state of Louisiana, for instance, met NCTQ's criteria for teaching early reading. Oklahoma, Mississippi, West Virginia and the District of Columbia were among other jurisdictions that did relatively well on NCTQ's rankings. My home state of Massachusetts was among the poorest performers on NCTQ's assessment of how well teachers were being prepared to teach reading. Teachers education programs in Connecticut, New Hampshire, Vermont and New Jersey were also judged harshly by NCTQ. The problem for NCTQ is that, according to data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), 4th grades students in MA, CT, NH, VT and NJ do much better on the NAEP reading assessment than students from LA, MS, WV and DC. To further explore the relationship between student reading achievement and NCTQ's assessment of teacher preparation programs in the various states, I computed a correlation between the proportion of teacher preparation programs that met NCTQ's standards in each state and the District of Columbia and NAEP scores for 4th grade reading in each state. The result was a slight negative correlation between NCTQ's ratings and NAEP scores for each jurisdiction. Put differently, there is absolutely no relationship between NCTQ's ratings for teacher preparation programs in states and the District of Columbia and 4th grade students' reading achievement in those states. If there was any validity to NCTQ's ratings of how well teacher preparation programs in different states prepared teachers to teach reading you'd expect states in which NCTQ judged teachers to be well prepared (like Louisiana) to do well on the NAEP and states where teachers were judged to be less well prepared (like Massachusetts) to less well. But that is not the case and, in fact, there is a slight tendency for states that do relatively well by NCTQ's criteria to do poorly on the NAEP. This finding, combined with a host of methodological problems that plague the NCTQ review (no evidence that syllabi are a valid way to assess course quality, for example), completely undermine any claims made by NCTQ about how well teachers are prepared to teach early reading. My analysis doesn't prove that all is well in teacher education and I'm sure there is plenty of room for improvement (and, no doubt, some programs are not doing as good a job as others). The NCTQ report, however, offers nothing to judge either way.