What motivates NCTQ?

On its website, NCTQ positions itself as a champion of education whose only interest is improving the quality of classroom teachers. Its history of trashing teacher education in the US based on shoddy methodology suggests another motive: destroying public confidence in teacher training institutions. Indeed, according to educational historian and former Trustee of the conservative Fordham Foundation DianeRavitch, NCTQ was founded by the conservative Fordham Foundation “with the explicit purpose of harassing institutions of teacher education.” NCTQ appears to be in sync with Reid Lyons, the man often described at George W. Bush’s “reading czar,” who once commented that, "If there was any piece of legislation that I could pass it would be to blow up colleges of education." This begs the question as to why NCTQ would be interested in harassing (or, perhaps, “blowing up”) schools of education. The answer lies in the broader efforts of educational reformers to “re-form” education through the application of the principles of the free market. Vouchers, charter schools and alternative teacher education programs are viewed as panaceas for all the problems that plague American education. The basic assumption is that competition insures that only the best schools (including schools of education) will survive. To date, vouchers and charter schools have a very mixed record and, in any case, education based on the free market is fundamentally at odds with the assumption that one of the primary goals of public education is to prepare citizens ready to take their place in a participatory democracy. Likewise, low budget, highly circumscribed alternative teacher preparation programs prepare teachers ready to teach only highly-scripted curricula but who are unprepared to address the broader goals of democratic schooling. In this formulation teachers and students are all seen as mere cogs in the free market that makes little accommodation to the individual differences that make students and teachers interesting, thoughtful people. This dystopian vision of schooling is a threat to democratic schools -- and democratic governance more generally -- and must be resisted.