Richard Allington is a well-known scholar of reading. These are his comments on the NCTQ report in teacher preparation institutions. (He left this comment on the blog, so there is no other source.)
“Imagine a person reviews the restaurants in your city by examining the menus they found on-line. Never tasted the food or ever visited any restaurant. How seriously would you take the reviews that were written? That is the NCTQ report on colleges of education. Had NCTQ not already developed a reputation for sloppy “research” perhaps ed schools would have cooperated. Personally, I’m glad they didn’t.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Is there a link for his quote?
Reblogged this on Transparent Christina.
The restaurant analogy is totally apt, one to one in it’s accuracy. I and others have been using it as well. On top of this there are the many serious inaccuracies, ersatz data that was phoned in on 2 tin cans connected with string. Reformers must have even more money to burn than I thought as their people got paid to spend a lot of time on a “report” that barely rises to the level of propaganda. Did any of them get called on the carpet? On either side of the desk? I think not as this is just an example of the reformers lie machine coming up to speed in response to the growing fact driven push back against all of their policies.
That sad thing? Their “report” ended up in the press and the public bought it. Who cares about the truth anymore? Journalism is dead. Upton Sinclair is rolling over in his grave.
What started out as something that seemed to hit my part of the world only, I see now is a nation wide topic of conversation and concern. The NCTQ Reports! (Insert scary music here) I had no idea that this was going across the nation, until 3 or 4 days after a local news station brought the report to its viewers in my city. Of course the population of public teachers felt attacked, again, including a colleague who expressed her own feelings of discouragement. Because I am a political junkie when it comes to education, I decided to read the report myself. I have to say that I didn’t get pass the first paragraph without laughing.
The statement that the NCTQ report was a “tool for consumers” is what stopped me in my tracks. That alone speaks volumes! All educators know that we use several different tools for teaching and assessment, and that there is no “one size fits all” approach. I recently was involved in a 2-day training about creating a tool to be used state wide, evaluating how effective teachers are and then that performance tied to our pay – another nation wide concern. In this case, our legislation passed the teacher evaluation bill SB 64, and then left it for teachers in our state to create it. Sounds like a conspiracy to me. Especially when they are not willing to support our efforts, even through funding. But we shall prevail as experts!
Back to my original comment…
So now I know that this report is just one of many tools out there. Not a problem, I can find one that is reliable and valid if this one isn’t. This reminds me of a statement I heard many years ago, and I am unable to remember who said it? “Statistics don’t lie; statisticians do.” Now the second word of this statement that catches me, is consumers. When did public education start to have consumers and retailers? I assume they go hand in hand, right? So now I am in the business of supply and demand? Interesting! I always saw myself as a role model, a guide, a motivator, intrinsic, and ready to make a difference in the world. I never thought I would have to sell my product!
Consumerism, as we all know, is a business term. A term used by big corporations whose interest in privatizing public schools into charters, is an outrage for teachers in the public sector. I can only assume that the group of people who sat down and created this report over coffee and donuts, are in fact from our capitalist society. That’s fine, but don’t expect the rest of America to join in on your kumbayaa session, because eventually word spreads like fire. Not only are educators in any role going to speak out against this, non-educators will listen and start to question these people’s intentions. It may sound unrealistic, but I have a hard time believing that a majority of Americans think public education and teachers are the guilty ones in our current state of affairs.
So for me, I didn’t need to get into the nitty-gritty details of what is outlined in NCTQ’s report, to know that this is trash. I saw it from the beginning! The only valuable outcome of this report, are the comments and efforts to de-bunk this report, that teachers and educators were motivated to share publically across this country! I am proud to be a teacher and one among millions who are able to see through the invalid beliefs of others. It almost fuels me with passion to continue to stand up and make myself be heard by the deaf ears of the people who think they know better than me. Eventually, their day will come. In the meantime, I know we are losing highly effective teachers who are completely worn out by worthless attacks on our profession. But their efforts to prevail, were not in vain. In the end, it will be a part of something big. A paradigm change that will allow teachers in public education, to do their job and not be dictated to from those who don’t know what it’s like to teach 30 different personalities in one room, with 30 different learning traits, 30 different home situations, 30 different talents and weaknesses, and 30 students who never asked to be in the crossfire of this debate.
Yay! Another Utah teacher! The Deseret News, no friend to public education, was particularly vociferous in their bashing of teachers. I’m frankly tired of the press buying this garbage as real. No one seemed to look at NCTQ’s research methods or anything, just bought this nonsense part and parcel. And if teachers complain about it, we are just “part of the establishment.”
And you only have 30 students? You must be from a different area in Utah than I am. I have as many as 36 students, and some of my colleagues have 40, per class (I teach middle school).
Utahteacher: what the edubullies propose to use as evaluation of the teachers for the schools of OTHER PEOPLE’S CHILDREN is very different from what they pay for, treasure and value in the teachers of the schools they send THEIR OWN CHILDREN to.
Yes, the terms “pay for” and “treasure” and “value” were deliberately chosen because you must remember that when it comes to THEIR OWN CHILDREN, well, nothing is too good for their “most precious assets.”
Just ask Michelle Rhee.
🙂
There seem to be several things that “they” wish for their children that many here would disagree with. No required certification for teachers, no automatic pay increases for longevity or additional degrees earned, no union representation for teachers, employment at will, and most importantly choosing a school independently of the exact location of a house.
Should “they” wish that for everyone’s children?
TE,
Your ability to turn a conversation into one of “school choice”, i.e., consumerism is amazing!!!
That was only a small part of my comment. It seems to me that if a person wants all schools to be like the schools “the 1%” send their own children to, they have to accept the whole package which includes choice, amoung the other things I listed.
I would expand slightly on what Allington offers – not only has NCTQ never sampled the food, they have not even checked to find out if the menu accurately reflects what is available at the restaurants, or even if it is a current menu.
teacherken: lest anyone think you are exaggerating, I invite viewers of your comment to read the following excerpts from a blog post by Aaron Pallas entitled “The trouble with NCTQ’s ratings of teacher-prep programs”:
“To be sure, few of us relish being put under the microscope. But it’s another matter entirely to be seen via a funhouse mirror. My institution, Teachers College at Columbia University, didn’t receive a summary rating of zero to four stars in the report, but the NCTQ website does rate some features of our teacher-prep programs. I was very gratified to see that our undergraduate elementary and secondary teacher-education programs received four out of four stars for student selectivity. Those programs are really tough to get into—nobody gets admitted. And that’s not hyperbole; the programs don’t exist.
That’s one of the dangers of rating academic programs based solely on documents such as websites and course syllabi. You might miss something important—like “Does this program exist?””
Click on the following link for the entire blog entry: http://eyeoned.org/content/the-trouble-with-nctqs-ratings-of-teacher-prep-programs_478/
Once again, Kafka got a beat down by the edubullies. But we’ve been warned about this long ago:
“Why shouldn’t truth be stranger than fiction? Fiction, after all, has to make sense.” [Mark Twain]
🙂
The fact that the NCTQ’s research is so skimpy and lacking in robustness only deals them a harder and more unforgiving blow. It’s the educated who make up the organization and mostly the educated who read their material. . . .
Did they think no one would notice?
The more they assert their un-empirical position, the more they lose credibility. Maybe the reformers will believe them, but this is yet another example of how we will always have the truth behind us and the reformers will have sacks of dung – expensive dung – disguised as the truth.
isnt it time someone exposed< and trumpeted LOUDLY, IN PUBLIC, who is behind NCTQ? They came into Seattle a few years ago, bitching about teacher unions and teacher quality and contracts etc in a template research paper, which they trotted around the country, just changing the name of the city or school district they have in their sights…. I checked them out then and found they're funded by the usual ed deform suspects – notably the Gates and Broad Foundations! Astro-turf all the way! They list their funders plain as day, on their website: http://www.nctq.org/p/about/funders.jsp
Well, isn’t that SPECIAL!
NCTQ was created by the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation in 2000. Its goal as to undermine schools of education and promote alternatives. In its foundling years, it struggled but was sustained by a $5 million grant by Rod Paige.
its way past time to stop being so naive about all of this…. its time to expose the scandal that is public education deform – time to publicly “follow the money and connect the dots” to the corporations, time to show how our kids are being used as cash cows and teachers are being targeted/vilified because they stand in the way of that process (qualified, experienced teachers are expensive, people! They cut into the profit margin)….
The public isnt going to recognise that NCTQ is a sham front for the ed deformers and that everything that comes out of that organisation is BS, designed to serve the corporate agenda and achieve its goals, unless you tell them…. the public is just going to believe what comes out on official-looking letterhead unless you tell them who is behind all of this…It’s just like the NSA spying scandal – people naively believe that the govt has their best interest’s at heart UNTIL someone show’s what is really going on….
Time to pull back the curtain and show who are the puppet masters….
Kevin Huffman, Chris Cerf and all the other BROADIE Chiefs endorsed the NCTQ report. Additionally, there are BROADIES on the Board of Directors and BROADIES on the Advisory Board too!
So what can we say about ELi Broad’s ten weekend Superintendent Academy?
That it’s 110% Pure USDA Grade AAA Bovine Excrement.
The chutzpah it takes to do something like the Broadie Academy is beyond belief.
It’s basically Checker Finn and his whole gang, same old suspects. I was glad the NY Times didn’t cover it, because the whole thing is a press release, not a news story.
Checker Finn????
Chester Finn, aka Checker Finn, staunch rheeform lobbyist in Texas, former education official under Bush the 1st, and an overall disingenuous human being.
Isn’t this pretty much the same way our K-12 schools are being “evaluated”?
No boots on the ground, just a sample lab analysis done, perhaps, on the day the chef was out sick.