New Action to Improve Teacher Preparation

The U.S. Department of Education is moving forward with a plan to improve the recruitment and preparation of our nation’s teachers.  This is welcome news since educator preparation programs have been shown to lack the rigor and training needed for effective teaching, as the infographic below from the Department shows.  The National Council on Teacher Quality has rated schools of education across the country, and found:

• While countries where students outperform the U.S. recruit teacher candidates from the top third of the college-going population, only one in four U.S. programs restricts admissions to even the top half of the college-going population.
• 71% of programs are not providing elementary teacher candidates with practical, research-based training in reading instruction methods that could reduce the current 30% rate of reading failure to less than 10%.
• Only 19% of US programs providing mathematics training for elementary teacher candidates, demonstrate similar expectations of higher performing nations such as Singapore or South Korea.
• Almost all programs (93%) fail to ensure a high quality student teaching experience, where candidates are assigned only to highly skilled teachers and must receive frequent concrete feedback.
• Only 23% of rated programs are doing enough to provide teacher candidates with concrete classroom management strategies to improve classroom behavior problems.
• Only 11% of elementary programs and 47% of secondary programs are providing adequate content preparation for teachers in the subjects they will teach.

Evidence consistently shows that teachers are the most important in-school factor in raising student achievement so it is extremely important that we address these gross deficiencies in our teacher preparation programs.  While Massachusetts did better than the national ratings in providing content preparation at the secondary level (73%), it fell behind at the elementary level (9%) and generally did not do well in the areas listed above.

The Department of Higher Education is taking this challenge seriously but it will require strong political will to take on the entrenched interests at the state’s schools of education.   The plan being developed by the U.S. Department of Education has the potential to provide the tools and motivation to take action here in the Commonwealth.