Jack Hassard, professor emeritus of science education at Georgia State University, here reviews the ratings of the National Council on Teacher Quality and declares them to be “junk science.” He looks at the Georgia institutions of teacher preparation and finds that the ratings are haphazard, spotty, and inaccurate. The he gathers some of the major critiques by others and concludes that the ratings as a whole are bogus, nothing more than propaganda to undermine teacher preparation and force it into NCTQ’s political framework. He calls the NCTQ ratings an “assault on teacher preparation.”
Professor Hassard taught science education at GSU for 33 years. He notes that 21 institutions offer 269 programs for teacher preparation in Georgia. Of those 269, the NCTQ reviewed 39, not by visiting them but by reading course catalogues and syllabi, which reveal nothing about the quality of the programs. He calls the Georgia ratings “feeble and incompetent.”
The ratings were assembled, writes Hassard, by unqualified reviewers: “We analyzed the make-up of the NCTQ people, and discovered that it represents a “stacked deck.” Only 2.5% of the participants in the review were teacher educators–active professors out there doing teacher education. The NCTQ was stacked with corporate executives, foundation executives, and employees of NCTQ. It was far from representing the field of teacher education.”
He adds: “The “methods” used include sources including: syllabi (when they can get them), textbooks, catalogs, handbooks, evaluation forms. We show that the NCTQ report on teacher preparation is junk science. The method that they employed in their study avoided data from the very sources that could help uncover the nature of teacher preparation. These sources are faculty, administrators, students, and cooperating school districts and educators. Without interviewing and observing teacher preparation programs directly, and without establishing a cooperative relationship with the these institutions, the NCTQ condemns itself to false claims, outright opinions that have little bearing on the nature of teacher preparation.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Is this more preaching to the choir? I hope not.
If only the “choir” had all heard the “sermons” warning of corporate reform and the of destruction of the teaching profession, and had realized and truly grasped how dire the situation is, and how it is becoming more and more dire at a rapid rate.
Until and unless every member of this choir hears and recognizes all this, and then responds forcefully to counter it, public education and democracy is threatened.
Most teachers don’t know how dangerous corporate reform is, union-busting is, de-professionlizing of teaching and replacing university teacher prep programs with cheap, Walmart-style training, for the lowly-paid, short-term, fired-at-will force that corporate reformers wish to replace long-term, university-trained teachers.
Whenever I hear a teacher say, “I don’t want to get involved in all those politics and controversy. I just want to teacher.”‘
Before 2001 and NCLB, that attitude would have been fine. Now, however, that is a luxury that teachers, parents, and students can ill afford.
WAKE UP!!!!
I wish it was preaching to the choir. Too many teachers still think they are insulated from the worst of the abuses. Who knows how many are hiding hoping that “it” will all blow over.
As Diane has said more than once, this evaluation is one aspect of PR for an ideology. Facts don’t matter. The credibility of the rating method does not matter. Posturing about scientific “objectivity” and acting as if some invisible hand of “consensus” justified the ratings is all part of the performance in this theater of the absurd. The intent is to discredit teacher education programs within institutions of higher education with quickie Teach For America and on-line programs among the favored alternatives.
It’s so frustrating, because the media treats these “ratings” as if they come from Mt. Sinai. I really wish that this information could ALSO go to the media, at the same time that these “ratings” came out, so that the media wouldn’t report as if these ratings were the truth.
With all due respect to Jack Hassard, when he declared re the 2013 NCTQ ratings that when he used “a junk science model developed by M.S. Carolan” he concluded “that this NCTQ study scored high on the junk science index, and therefore warrants 4 cautions–the highest rating possible in the model”—
Mr. Hassard is giving the phrase “junk science” a black eye.
After all, this is the same NCTQ that that same year, well, I’ll let Aaron Pallas relate in full the “tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing”:
[start quote]
Yesterday, the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) released its first national ratings of teacher-preparation programs. Passing judgment on 1,200 undergraduate and graduate programs across the country—but not other routes to teacher certification, such as Teach For America—NCTQ painted a dismal picture. Only four institutions rated four out of four stars: Furman, Lipscomb, Ohio State and Vanderbilt Universities. One hundred sixty-two programs received zero stars, earning them a “Consumer Alert” designation, and an additional 301 were awarded a single star.
The release of the ratings, and their damning character, came as no surprise to schools of education and their supporters. NCTQ has made its mission over the past decade to promote a particular vision of teacher education emphasizing criteria such as the academic performance of teacher candidates, instruction in the teaching of school subjects via scientifically proven methods, and rich clinical experiences. No one really knows if meeting NCTQ’s standards results in better teachers—but that hasn’t slowed down the organization a whit. If an ed school had a mix of goals and strategies different than NCTQ’s and chose not to cooperate in this institutional witch hunt, well, they must have something to hide.
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?”
Today, the editorial board of the Washington Post praised the NCTQ ratings, while blaming ed schools for why “many schools are struggling and why America lost its preeminent spot in the world for education.” Sunspots too, I suppose.
I look forward to the Post instructing their restaurant reviewer, Tom Sietsema, to rate restaurants based on their online menus rather than several in-person visits to taste the food.
[end quote]
Link: http://eyeoned.org/content/the-trouble-with-nctqs-ratings-of-teacher-prep-programs_478/
I hope I’ve made my point. Will we be getting an apology from Mr. Hassard for defaming the perfectly good pejorative phrase “junk science”?
Am I serious? An apology?
😏
Nah, not really. Not even rheeally…
Thank you, Mr. Hassard.
😎
Your welcome, Krazyta. Sorry to write disparagingly about JS.