Ed Fuller has been conducting research on education policies in Texas, Pennsylvania, and elsewhere for many years. His published work is careful and peer-reviewed.
Here he analyzes the recent report of the National Council on Teacher Quality and finds it woefully weak. To begin with, it looked only at inputs (catalogs and syllabi), not outputs like whether teachers got jobs as teachers and how long they remained in the profession. He is critical of their research methods.
And he notes that they did not review any of the alternative certification programs that are producing significant numbers of new teachers. The failure to include non-traditional routes is significant. Not even Teach for America or the proliferating online teacher prep programs were studied. Wonder why.
Please remember that NCTQ is not a think tank. It is an advocacy group.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I have one observation: Most if not all operations that call themselves “think tanks” are advocacy groups (including, to be fair, those I agree with). The term “think tank” is a propaganda term designed to fool the public and the press into believing that the reports that come out of these operations are impartial research, but they’re not — they’re propaganda. The propaganda term, intentionally designed to mislead, comes from the world of right-wing so-called “think tanks.”
By the way, this reminds me that CREDO, which has done a series of widely reported studies on charter schools, is a project of the Hoover Institution, but apparently makes some effort to disguise that. The Hoover Institution is a conservative, free-market, pro-privatization operation under the auspices of Stanford University (which in itself is not a conservative, free-market or pro-privatization operation). CREDO’s own website does not mention its affiliation with Hoover, but Hoover’s website lists CREDO as one of its projects, and Hoover’s website also lists CREDO director Macke Raymond as a Hoover fellow running CREDO as a Hoover project. The effort to disguise this is interesting. (Why doesn’t Hoover try to disguise it on its own website? Because Hoover needs to take credit to impress its funders! Full disclosure that I subcontracted to write Hoover’s annual report one year, 1997, and thus became aware of the need to advise the funders of what Hoover is doing.)
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When the rules of the game completely change, none of us ARE effective.
We were trained as teachers to be child-centered, teach in developmentally appropriate ways, to respect the innocence of children and value their individual personalities, to use strategies to reach every child, to engender a love of learning and help children recognize that through knowledge and a good education, all things are possible.
In the new paradigm, skill training, appropriate affective behavior, consensus of thought on global issues and conformity is the new thing.
We all live under the old paradigm. Of course we aren’t qualified.
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I think you are better qualified, as a traditionally trained teacher, even under the new, rather odious paradigm. The new paradigm dismisses your capabilities, and that will not serve them well. They are short-sighted, and untrained as educators though, so I shouldn’t be surprised.
What I’m trying to say is that regardless of ulterior motives, including inculcating those unnatural and non-intuitive affective behaviors that you mentioned, it would STILL be better to teach children as you were trained to do. Specifically, to teach with developmentally appropriate methods including respect for children as minors, protective of their innocence and trust,
Also, the lack of ability to think critically, that seems to be a by-product of the new paradigm, results in young adults who are ill-prepared for life in the “internet age”. They are taught to “question everything”. That is silly, presumptuous and impossible! In contrast, traditional education is more likely to enable adults to know when to ask questions, and impart familiarity with effective means of vetting.
Sometimes vetting is done with data and statistical methods, more often (for me) it’s through confirmation from original sources, or documentation. I learned observational statistics in college, not a MOOC or online course, but from a dour, elderly professor of statistics at a land grant university whose strength was in agronomy. I learned the latter from my wonderful teachers in high school, public high school.
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I would say this is surprising if that, in fact, were true. But, it isn’t surprising in the least.
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John Merrow has an interesting point in his column on this matter:
Walsh strongly defends the study and its methods, citing a dozen pilot studies prior to beginning the survey work and the thoroughness of their analysis and review. But her own views are both strong and well-known. Not one to mince words, she said to me last year that she could not stand Linda Darling-Hammond of Stanford’s teacher education program because “she’s an out-and-out liar. She gets up on stage and tells lie after lie.” (Stanford’s highly regarded programs received 1 ½ stars and 2 ½ stars, on a scale of 0-4.)
To Walsh’s attack, Mr. Merrow wrote:
John Merrow 25. Jun, 2013 at 6:01 pm #
Please do not construe my reporting of Kate Walsh’s ad hominem attack on Linda Darling-Hamnond as anything but an example of Walsh’s shoot first style. I have known Linda DH for a long time and cannot recall her playing fast and loose with the truth at any time. At the time I asked Walsh for examples. If she provided any, I don’t recall them. Perhaps she will now?
http://goo.gl/FoUMi
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Reblogged this on Elementary Thoughts and commented:
Great post. I was troubled to see my teacher prep program didn’t receive any stars on the NCTQ report! It is widely known around my area as being an awesome teacher prep program, which is why I chose it. Fuller describes how the NCTQ looked at limited factors when grading programs. I hope people pay attention to this as much as they are paying attention to the actual ratings – which I’m sure they won’t be. We’re caught up with standardized assessments and ratings. I think a more holistic, comprehensive approach to evaluating programs (and students) is necessary before we give any clout to prep program “scores.”
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I don’t necessarily disagree with you, but I am wondering what a more “holistic” assessment is? In the Advanced Placement program (in English) we do “holistic” assessment. There it means we don’t try to break down our scoring into separate categories of grammar, diction, thesis, support, logic and so forth, but simply go with a single number on a scale of 1 to 9 based on our experience as classroom teachers of literature and language. What do YOU mean by “holistic” and what are the criteria for selecting the people who do the rating?
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When I said a more “holistic, comprehensive” approach, I was referring to the study’s failure to include outputs as a rating factor (they only measured inputs – catalogs and syllabi). By outputs, I mean the actual teachers that come out of these programs. How can we rate a program based solely on what the professors and administration impose? It would be much more meaningful to look at the actual teachers that graduate from these programs. This would be a huge undertaking, but I think that measuring the teachers based on their successes (e.g., finding teaching jobs after graduation, how their students perform, how their superiors rate them, etc.) would be a far better indicator of a teacher prep program. Measuring a program based solely on their syllabi and course catalogs is just ridiculous.
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Think tanks are just that – places where people attempt to identify then link need to research to advocate for those changes that will address that need. What is important to address and how to best address the issue is the rub. Following NCLB we now have a very active debate on education, specialized groups that advocate for their perspective on how to improve it and more researchers than ever attempting to quantify & measure impacts of these programs on students. The greatest challenge is to attempt to fix education within the narrow educational field.
A classroom is a room where all the challenges and the future of a society comes and sits down almost everyday. We can talk curriculum, instruction, homework, throw out acronyms like STEM, EFL, IDEA however these are like a doctor only throwing medicine at a problem when therapy is needed for the medicine to be more effective. We can not raise the quality of our schools in a vacuum. The social standing of the middle class can not be separated from the decline of public education just as much as their lack of employment can not be separated from the income that funds public education.
Until we as a nation come to the acknowledgement that the changing socioeconomic factors has had a major negative affects of the psychological and physical health of our society as demonstrated in our education systems, ballooning incarceration rates, collapsing inner cities as well as declining family well-being we will never get past our Band-Aid, chewing gum and sealing wax approach to educational reform. Education is one piece of that comprehensive progressive societal reform is so needed and yet so far away. Put down institutional turf, cooked data, unrealistic budget request, cheap quick fix and failing programs. The major lesson of NCLB is that education can not change itself by itself, communities change themselves by comprehensive approaches – it is time for educative reformers to join their voices to the chorus instead of seeking a solo.
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My local paper, The Trenton Times, published an editorial by Eli Broad extolling the virtues of the NCTQ report and putting his own spin on the implications. I wrote a response as a letter to the editor which I have copied below.
To the Editor:
In the OpEd piece “A Better Way to Train Teachers,” (July 6), Eli Broad argues for the improvement of the quality of training that schools of education provide to prospective teachers. No one could argue with this; we want the highest possible quality of training for our teachers. Unfortunately, Mr. Broad sites the study done by the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) that is fatally flawed in its conception, in its research methodology and in its findings. The study was conceived by the NCTQ, which is not some neutral think tank dedicated to the public good, but an organization with direct ties to the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, Mr. Broad’s own Broad Foundations and other groups that are working to undermine public confidence in teachers and public schools. In other words, this group spent six years looking for a problem in teacher training and they found it – Surprise! Surprise!
Secondly, the study is flawed because it looked only at one small aspect of the program at schools of education – what could be gleaned by doing a search of the school’s website including course content, admissions policies and student teaching manuals. No attempt was made to look at the products of these institutions – how well did the graduates actually perform as teachers. Not one school was visited, interviewed or asked for input until after the report was published. Finally, the report was flawed in its findings because the final report was riddled with inaccuracies and misstatements to the point that its conclusions simply cannot be trusted.
This report was irresponsible and is the fruit of spurious research done with a political agenda. No policy decisions can be made from its findings. Schools of education must continually strive to provide the best possible educational program to students and certainly improvements can and should be made. Those seeking guidance on how to make improvements in the program will find no useful guidance from the NCTQ report.
Russ Walsh
Morrisville, PA
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