The National Coucil for Teacher Quality issued a report calling for higher admission standards for entrants into teaching, specifically, higher SAT and ACT scores. This report was reviewed on behalf of the National Education Policy Center. It is interesting and strange that so many people think that scores on the SAT or ACT have remarkable predictive powers. The cardinal rule of psychometric is that a test should be used only for the purpose for which it was designed. These tests were designed to gauge likely success in college, but multiple studies have concluded that the students’ four-year grade-point-average is more reliable than either the SAT or ACT. Why would anyone think they predict good teachers? NCTQ should turn its attention to making the teaching profession more fulfilling and rewarding. At a time of teacher shortages, raising the bar will exacerbate the shortage.
The NCTQ is Gates-funded and endorses VAM to rate teachers. So they start with a strong bias towards standardized testing.
NEPC says:
BOULDER, CO (March 23, 2017) – A recent report from the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) advocates for a higher bar for entry into teacher preparation programs. The NCTQ report suggests, based on a review of GPA and SAT/ACT requirements at 221 institutions in 25 states, that boosting entry requirements would significantly improve teacher quality in the U.S. It argues that this higher bar should be set by states, by the Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation (CAEP), and by the higher-education institutions themselves.
However, the report’s foundational claims are poorly supported, making its recommendations highly problematic.
The report, Within Our Grasp: Achieving Higher Admissions Standards in Teacher Prep, was reviewed by a group of scholars and practitioners who are members of Project TEER (Teacher Education and Education Reform). The team was led by Marilyn Cochran-Smith, the Cawthorne Professor of Teacher Education for Urban Schools at Boston College, along with Megina Baker, Wen-Chia Chang, M. Beatriz Fernández, & Elizabeth Stringer Keefe. The review is published by the Think Twice Think Tank Review Project at the National Education Policy Center, housed at University of Colorado Boulder’s School of Education.
The reviewers explain that the report does not provide the needed supports for its assertions or recommendations. It makes multiple unsupported and unfounded claims about the impact on teacher diversity of raising admissions requirements for teacher candidates, about public perceptions of teaching and teacher education, and about attracting more academically able teacher candidates.
Each claim is based on one or two cherry-picked citations while ignoring the substantial body of research that either provides conflicting evidence or shows that the issues are much more complex and nuanced than the report suggests. Ultimately, the reviewers conclude, the report offers little guidance for policymakers or institutions.
Find the review by Marilyn Cochran-Smith, Megina Baker, Wen-Chia Chang, M. Beatriz Fernández, & Elizabeth Stringer Keefe at:
http://nepc.colorado.edu/thinktank/review-admissions
Find Within Our Grasp: Achieving Higher Admissions Standards in Teacher Prep, by Kate Walsh, Nithya Joseph, & Autumn Lewis, published by the National Council on Teacher Quality, at:
http://www.nctq.org/dmsView/Admissions_Yearbook_Report
Diane Ravitch's blog 
If this is what they mean by “higher standards” – “specifically, higher SAT and ACT scores” – then the answer is most definitely no. Even if we agree (which I don’t) that high SAT and ACT scores means that someone is “smart”, there’s nothing about being “smart” that necessarily makes one a better teacher. In fact, people who have themselves struggled with academic material often make better teachers because they understand what it’s like not to get it.
Dienne, agreed. The ability to get high scores on standardized tests is no indication of being a successful teacher. An anecdote: a young friend decided she wanted to be a teacher. She was super smart. She aced the SAT and all other tests. She graduated with honors from an Ivy League college. She got a degree from Oxford. She entered teaching. She lasted less than a semester.
You said it best. We are woefully on the wrong track with policy dictated by the 1%, zealots and corporations. Unless we have a way to entice young people to choose this challenging career, we will continue to have a teacher shortage. Instead, the path we are on is all about blaming, micromanaging and cutting the salaries of the very people we need to make a difference in young people’s lives.
Isn’t this the organization that rated Columbia U’s undergrad teacher ed program when it didn’t have one? I just read Donald Heller et al. eloquent Open Letter to NCTQ at Education Week 12-10-13 (no pay wall).
So they reviewed the GPA and SAT/ACT requirements at 221 institutions in 25 states in order to reach the predetermined conclusion that the entrance requirements are not rigourous enough.
There is nothing new about this complaint and the implication that if teacher candidates are bright and know the subject they will teach then golly, all will be well in education. It is a shame that NCTQ cannot grasp that teaching is not just a matter of transmitting academic content.
“It is a shame that NCTQ cannot grasp that teaching is not just a matter of transmitting academic content.”
Just had an fb conversation with someone who claimed that having a “goobermint” job is easy, a piece of cake with great benefits. Hmmm, I told him that I had a “goobermint” job, being a teacher for 21 years. And that I’d bet him any quantity of money that he never had to as hard of a job as I and many other teachers do/have done, and I wasn’t talking the academic delivery part, as the day I walked into my first hour class knowing there were going to be two empty seats, one permanently, the other for the younger sister of the student killed in a car wreck the night before. Thank goodness for our professional counselors because I was a basket case not having any clue whatsoever what to do. Rips me apart now almost ten years later.
To hell with those supposedly “higher” academic standards. They have no validity nor have anything to do with the very human aspect of the teaching and learning process which cannot be taught but must be experienced.
The most sobering thing about entering the teaching profession (as a career choice not as an “experience” as some TFA types would) is that one’s college and graduate school preparation is in no way at the center of the skills needed to actually survive in the classroom. Raw communication skills and a fairly well-developed inter-personal and social radar are the real traits necessary. No college and no graduate school can put those in place. A solid humanities background can help them along, but they have to be there in the first place.
I have graduate and undergraduate degrees in the academic subject I teach (history), and no degrees in education (just the required classes I took for licensure much later). Teaching is not an academic job. It’s a social work job. It’s a public service job. The best teachers are good social workers and good public servants…..and extraordinarily good communicators, imbued with sympathy and a deep understanding of the worlds their students emerge from.
Once someone shows me a teacher preparation program that fosters and imbues these things, and then shows me how increased selectivity helps concentrate those things, I will be all for it. Alas, that will not happen because the conversation about teacher training is all about demeaning current teachers and shrinking the pool of potential teachers to a point where policy makes can only turn to corporate alternatives to public education.
As always, it’s not really about teacher training.
Simple—Higher scores could mean you are a good student. It does not mean you will be a good teacher nor does it indicate that you possess the qualities to be a good teacher.
I agree with you. While it is important for a teacher to have a solid content background, empathy, patience, determination, resilience, creativity, and humor are just as important. It helps a lot if teachers care about the young people they teach, and they can connect with them.
Well stated NYSTeacher!!
(minor quibble I might substitute empathy for sympathy in your statement “. . .imbued with_____”)
Agreed. In fact, as a mentor teacher I have recommended assertiveness training to people with course competence and high SAT scores. What they lacked was cultural sophistication, ability to adapt to new situations, and most importantly, charisma.
Having written “charisma,” I expect I will now see it become testable on a teacher qualification exam!
I wonder if “charisma” could be assessed in teacher prep programs as easily as “grit” is apparently assessed by BS Tests.
I do agree with you though. Having come to teaching from the private business world and not the more typical university path I see some things lacking in teacher prep programs, and they seem to revolve around presentation skills.
While method courses provide usually dependable paths for instruction, where does a teacher candidate learn how to pitch their voice to cut through the din of students without shouting? Or how to project a voice so the entire room can hear clearly? Or how to walk around the room while holding the attention of the students? Or how to use the physical space of a classroom as part of oral instruction? Or timing…when to use dramatic pauses in what we say to make a bigger impact? Or how to tell a joke… maybe?
I think a course combining public speaking course and improvisational acting might help teach those skills. I’ve certainly used the skills I gained from too many community theater productions to great effect in my classroom.
Now I don’t mean to suggest a teacher should be an entertainer, but their instruction could perhaps be more entertaining. I’d bet that many of us who have had success in the classroom gained those skills over time because they do have a positive impact on instruction.
Is it charisma? Nah, I think it’s just good, effective presentation skills.
My two cents…
“Reformer Logic”
While teachers are fleeing
Right out of the door
The plan we are seeing
Is “Raise the bar more”
For raising it surely
Will lead to a rash
Of premium teachers
Reformers can bash
May I join you?
The standards for teachers are cooked up in a lab
Only for those who’d join unions
But if leaving teaching soon, then
There need be no standards for TFA scabs
I have been very disappointed by NCTQ’s uncritical love of education reform and its proponents like Michelle Rhee as well as the reformers endless and empty touting of the need for “great teachers” as if that’s all students need.
I also agree that the SAT and ACT don’t predict who will be a good teacher, but neither does h.s. GPA.
Nonetheless, there’s a problem with simply assuming that h.s. GPA’s are so much more reliable. We live in a time of enormous pressure on principals and teachers to maintain high promotion and graduation rates. “Credit recovery,” competency-based credit (both mostly online) have lowered the standards for receiving course credit, thus making GPAs unreliable as indicators of achievement.
A standardized test like the ACT or SAT is a useful check. A high GPA and low SAT score (on a standardized test that a student is motivated to do his or her best, as opposed to standardized test that has no meaning for the student) should raise questions.
“A standardized test like the ACT or SAT is a useful check.”
Ummm, NO! It is not a “useful check”. It is a completely bogus and invalid check with no sound basis in rationo-logical thought nor onto-epistemological basis. How can a COMPLETE INVALIDITY be useful?
If I may refer you to the never refuted nor rebutted treatise by Noel Wilson that delineates all the errors and falsehoods and psychometric fudgings that render any conclusions from standardized testing COMPLETELY INVALID.
“Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” found at: http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/577/700
Brief outline of Wilson’s “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” and some comments of mine.
A description of a quality can only be partially quantified. Quantity is almost always a very small aspect of quality. It is illogical to judge/assess a whole category only by a part of the whole. The assessment is, by definition, lacking in the sense that “assessments are always of multidimensional qualities. To quantify them as unidimensional quantities (numbers or grades) is to perpetuate a fundamental logical error” (per Wilson). The teaching and learning process falls in the logical realm of aesthetics/qualities of human interactions. In attempting to quantify educational standards and standardized testing the descriptive information about said interactions is inadequate, insufficient and inferior to the point of invalidity and unacceptability.
A major epistemological mistake is that we attach, with great importance, the “score” of the student, not only onto the student but also, by extension, the teacher, school and district. Any description of a testing event is only a description of an interaction, that of the student and the testing device at a given time and place. The only correct logical thing that we can attempt to do is to describe that interaction (how accurately or not is a whole other story). That description cannot, by logical thought, be “assigned/attached” to the student as it cannot be a description of the student but the interaction. And this error is probably one of the most egregious “errors” that occur with standardized testing (and even the “grading” of students by a teacher).
Wilson identifies four “frames of reference” each with distinct assumptions (epistemological basis) about the assessment process from which the “assessor” views the interactions of the teaching and learning process: the Judge (think college professor who “knows” the students capabilities and grades them accordingly), the General Frame-think standardized testing that claims to have a “scientific” basis, the Specific Frame-think of learning by objective like computer based learning, getting a correct answer before moving on to the next screen, and the Responsive Frame-think of an apprenticeship in a trade or a medical residency program where the learner interacts with the “teacher” with constant feedback. Each category has its own sources of error and more error in the process is caused when the assessor confuses and conflates the categories.
Wilson elucidates the notion of “error”: “Error is predicated on a notion of perfection; to allocate error is to imply what is without error; to know error it is necessary to determine what is true. And what is true is determined by what we define as true, theoretically by the assumptions of our epistemology, practically by the events and non-events, the discourses and silences, the world of surfaces and their interactions and interpretations; in short, the practices that permeate the field. . . Error is the uncertainty dimension of the statement; error is the band within which chaos reigns, in which anything can happen. Error comprises all of those eventful circumstances which make the assessment statement less than perfectly precise, the measure less than perfectly accurate, the rank order less than perfectly stable, the standard and its measurement less than absolute, and the communication of its truth less than impeccable.”
In other words all the logical errors involved in the process render any conclusions invalid.
The test makers/psychometricians, through all sorts of mathematical machinations attempt to “prove” that these tests (based on standards) are valid-errorless or supposedly at least with minimal error [they aren’t]. Wilson turns the concept of validity on its head and focuses on just how invalid the machinations and the test and results are. He is an advocate for the test taker not the test maker. In doing so he identifies thirteen sources of “error”, any one of which renders the test making/giving/disseminating of results invalid. And a basic logical premise is that once something is shown to be invalid it is just that, invalid, and no amount of “fudging” by the psychometricians/test makers can alleviate that invalidity.
Having shown the invalidity, and therefore the unreliability, of the whole process Wilson concludes, rightly so, that any result/information gleaned from the process is “vain and illusory”. In other words start with an invalidity, end with an invalidity (except by sheer chance every once in a while, like a blind and anosmic squirrel who finds the occasional acorn, a result may be “true”) or to put in more mundane terms crap in-crap out.
And so what does this all mean? I’ll let Wilson have the second to last word: “So what does a test measure in our world? It measures what the person with the power to pay for the test says it measures. And the person who sets the test will name the test what the person who pays for the test wants the test to be named.”
In other words it attempts to measure “’something’ and we can specify some of the ‘errors’ in that ‘something’ but still don’t know [precisely] what the ‘something’ is.” The whole process harms many students as the social rewards for some are not available to others who “don’t make the grade (sic)” Should American public education have the function of sorting and separating students so that some may receive greater benefits than others, especially considering that the sorting and separating devices, educational standards and standardized testing, are so flawed not only in concept but in execution?
My answer is NO!!!!!
One final note with Wilson channeling Foucault and his concept of subjectivization:
“So the mark [grade/test score] becomes part of the story about yourself and with sufficient repetitions becomes true: true because those who know, those in authority, say it is true; true because the society in which you live legitimates this authority; true because your cultural habitus makes it difficult for you to perceive, conceive and integrate those aspects of your experience that contradict the story; true because in acting out your story, which now includes the mark and its meaning, the social truth that created it is confirmed; true because if your mark is high you are consistently rewarded, so that your voice becomes a voice of authority in the power-knowledge discourses that reproduce the structure that helped to produce you; true because if your mark is low your voice becomes muted and confirms your lower position in the social hierarchy; true finally because that success or failure confirms that mark that implicitly predicted the now self-evident consequences. And so the circle is complete.”
In other words students “internalize” what those “marks” (grades/test scores) mean, and since the vast majority of the students have not developed the mental skills to counteract what the “authorities” say, they accept as “natural and normal” that “story/description” of them. Although paradoxical in a sense, the “I’m an “A” student” is almost as harmful as “I’m an ‘F’ student” in hindering students becoming independent, critical and free thinkers. And having independent, critical and free thinkers is a threat to the current socio-economic structure of society.
And the ACT means even less when we start to use it as a reflection of our schools. Under those conditions, prep classes can elevate scores in a way that make a barely competent student look good. I have been teaching a class full of 20+ on the math ACT that are not as prepared as my 17s used to be.
Pass the popcorn!
Not that I disagree with you regarding how standardized testing can illuminate the discrepancy of subjective grading that can be manipulated to make things look better for all involved.
My kiddo’s standardized test results mirrored the areas of weakness that we battled with the school to provide the remedial instruction that would have been effective and that they offered already to students at the school.
(And which we were pushed to the private sector to obtain- as well as they repeatedly denied to provide it, even after the IEE and neuro-psychologist explained very clearly why it was needed, based on the WCJ and other nationally normed achievement test results (that paralleled their own internal testing) and areas of weakness along with the fact that the program takes typically 2 years or more to complete, and the student only had 2 years left of HS.
But apparently it is fine to let kids needlessly struggle, year after year and never seriously work on helping them to close the gaps they present with (sometimes due to demographics, but not always) – because that is reality for a significant portion of the students.
Yet those students struggle needlessly usually for years and typically forever, as adults way after they have left primary & secondary school, and most also end up worse off than their siblings or non-SLD peers emotionally and socio-economically as well.
What are “IEE”, “WCJ” & “SLD”? TIA, Duane
Your unquestioned reliance on standardized test scores that cannot be rationo-logically justified (see my post above) serves as a false starting point in your dilemma. Perhaps the teachers and school personnel realize the total inadequacy of standardized testing to describe and evaluate your child’s work, and that what they see on a day to day basis shows a different assessment of his/her work. I would trust their professional expertise in day in and day out working with your child before any standardized test score. That said. . .
I can understand your frustration in that many students, like your child, have not received an appropriate level of services for their disabilities. I have known quite a few parents who have had to fight tooth and nail to get said services. And it is wrong that the services are not offered up front to fulfill the needs of the child. Unfortunately, sometimes districts look to the costs first of providing said services, not to the benefits accrued to the child and make poor educational decisions based upon monetary concerns instead of student needs.
For sure it predicts how much your family earns–almost flawlessly as tho designed to dodo. Hint hint. And ones race adds a little extra predictive power.
Sent from my iPhone
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Again, this is slightly off topic but of importance in understanding Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch.
……….
Unanimous Supreme Court overturns a Gorsuch decision … in the middle of his confirmation hearing
By Laura Clawson
Wednesday Mar 22, 2017 · 11:05 AM CDT…Daily Kos
Neil Gorsuch’s belief in reading the law as narrowly as needed to screw ordinary people reared its head again during his Supreme Court confirmation hearing Wednesday, but not because of anything Gorsuch himself said on Wednesday. No, the issue was something the entire United States Supreme Court said—that Gorsuch was wrong in a 2008 opinion dealing with the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. Ian Millhiser writes:
Under Gorsuch’s opinion in Luke P., a school district complies with the law so long as they provide educational benefits that “must merely be ‘more than de minimis.’”
“De minimis” is a Latin phrase meaning “so minor as to merit disregard.” So Gorsuch essentially concluded that school districts comply with their obligation to disabled students so long as they provide those students with a little more than nothing.
All eight justices rejected Gorsuch’s approach. IDEA, Chief Justice Roberts wrote, “is markedly more demanding than the ‘merely more than de minimis’ test applied by the Tenth Circuit.” Indeed, Roberts added, Gorsuch’s approach would effectively strip many disabled students of their right to an education.
Sure, maybe if Antonin Scalia had been alive, the Supreme Court’s decision would have been 8-1, but Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas just said Gorsuch was wrong—and wrong because he would deny disabled kids an education.
Asked about this during his hearing Wednesday, Gorsuch stuck to his confirmation strategy of appearing as bland as possible and said, “That’s fine.”
I read an article & a whole bunch of comments on that. Also saw a bit of Feinsten/ Gorsuch Q&A on it. And just read Gorsuch’s 2008 ruling. I remember Gorsuch saying in hearings that he was restricted in that ruling by prior rulings by his circuit court. I saw in his ruling that there had been 3 prior rulings which interpreted the IDEA law in a narrow way. His ruling even pointed out that the 10th circuit was in the minority on that interpretation (w/cites).
As I understand it, if there are precedents set in that circuit, one has to consider them as “the law”, & simply apply them, otherwise by considered as legislating from the bench. So the case seemed appropriate for Supreme Court, which can compare rulings from the various circuits, decide if one circuit is out of line, & overrule it.
So then using that as the standard, was the first judge in that circuit to “set the precedent for “de minimus” also legislating from the bench?
No, I think it’s more that the fed law left interpretive wiggle-room; 10th circuit chose a niggardly apprach while the majority of circuits interpreted it more generously, so the 10th circ case was accepted by supreme court & brought up to par. As you note below, the bar is still set too low. But the point is, Gorsuch’s ruling reflects prior rulings in his circuit, all of them made before he was on its panel, so doesn’t tell us, for example, how he would have ruled on the Luke P case as a SC justice.
And highly doubtful that this ruling changes very much in the field…
Even after this current SCOTUS ruling, the judges in the various circuits will now have only a slightly higher bar. IMHO, true FAPE is not: “reasonably calculated to enable the child to achieve passing marks and advance from grade to grade.” ….
True FAPE is ensuring that they are achieving foundational skill sets that meet proficiency of their academic potential, or at least to a level of proficiency equivalent to their same age and grade level peers, to reasonably accepted ability levels.
We know that not all students may be able to achieve to the same extents of their peers, but they can achieve to reasonable levels based on their abilities when provided with effective instructional methods and the appropriate technology, etc; as well as it’s been proven over and over when parents homeschool their children when the schools chose to offer only the barely more than de minimus option.
I taught in a large urban district. You needed more than academic smarts to survive. I remember one first day of school where I encountered one of our new faculty members. He was fresh out of college, a brain, I was told. I tried to say hello and speak to him, but when speaking to him you could tell he didn’t have the social and emotional skills that teachers need in their bag of tricks. As the year progressed, he didn’t “get” the kids and they acted out for him. He couldn’t explain math in a way that they understood so they were merciless with him. When I heard him ask his supervisor for a paraprofessional and the supervisor asked why he needed one, I knew he was not going to be there long. His answer to his supervisor was that he needed a paraprofessional to control the kids because he could not. Many of the teachers in his department without his high powered degree and gpa had no problem controlling the kids and making math interesting.
This initiative won’t produce better anything. All it will do is make the teacher shortage worse.
I think we can now conclude: When colleges put “higher standards” in place they take the “ivory tower syndrome” to new extremes.
That in graduates who are even LESS prepared for the real world – NOT graduates who are more adaptable and productive.
When an industry (like education) says it wasn’t better prepared graduates, they DON’T mean graduates with ethereal education. They generally mean they need more students who can arrive ready to work with minimal supervision.
And that’s why the problem is NOT fixed by “higher standards”. It’s fixed with well rounded education, real world experience, and graduates encouraged to discover on their own and explore in order to learn.
NO!
Will teach for america scabs have to pass the higher admission standards? No.
Will teach for america scabs have to pay for masters degrees? No – they are awarded advanced degrees through the relay tfa “college” in a weekend or two. Kinda sorta like the broad academy — not a real school.
Will teach for america scabs have to jump through any hoops at all? No. They will be given 5 weeks summer training, a place to live, rent subsidies, stipends from the colleges from which they graduated, all sorts of perks, plus take a job away from a certified, licensed teacher who actually wants to be a teacher.
Making it harder for teachers who want to become teachers is just another cog in the reform wheel. If they can make it a truly expensive and vile process, it clears the way for more tfa turds.
That’s my take.
NCQT… >doh!<. Glad their proposal received a thorough debunking.
“The NCTQ is Gates-funded and endorses VAM to rate teachers. So they start with a strong bias towards standardized testing.”
This is all you need to know if you’re “in the know” about Mr. Gates.
He’s a tech wizard. Numbers, numbers, numbers. That’s his genius. He believes that his area of expertise can be applied to areas outside of that sphere. And he has the money to try to make those beliefs into reality. So much money that he can continue to pound that square peg into a round hole for decades without missing a beat.
So, Bill wants a simple and easily quantified numbers based means of assessing whether we’re smart or not. Enter the standardized test. Which can be and is now administered, graded, and analyzed on…oh! On a computer!
Duane Swacker,
Thank you for introducing me to Noel Wilson. His 13 sources of error may be helpful in trying to explain the invalidity and bogus nature of the NCLB’s – and now the ESSA’s – abuse of testing and other performance measures in the mandatory, so-called “school accountability” framework that each state education agency has to submit to the USED. They reminded me of David Hacker Fischer’s “Historian’s Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought” (Harper, 1970).
Missing from Wilson’s list is what I would call the “collectivist error,” as in measuring performance of “the school,” i.e. whole faculty, with student test averages and other performance indicators, as if the faculty were one person. But then, he wrote that analysis in 1998, back when the ed reformers were still in their plotting phase.
You objected to my statement, “A standardized test like the ACT or SAT is a useful check.” I should have qualified it: “A standardized test like the ACT or SAT or SAT II is, very roughly, a useful check on the validity of a student’s GPA.”
Nonetheless, after having seen and reported falsified student records and, more recently, the mass adoption of credit recovery and other anti-teaching and learning scams, ACT or SAT (on which students have a self-interest in doing their best – as opposed to standardized tests for so-called “school accountability” that don’t trigger students self-interest motivation but are used to blame teachers, close schools, etc.) gives a rough and useful check on the validity of the GPA.
Reason: By the time students take the SAT or ACT, usually in junior and senior years, DC students have taken – and would have passed – Algebra I, Geometry, Algebra II and 3 years of h.s. English. If large numbers of these students still scored between the 10th and 16th percentiles on these tests, that should raise questions about the validity of their GPA’s and the passing grades in those courses.
As Diane wrote, tests are valid for the purpose for which they were designed, which, for the SAT & ACT, is the likelihood of success in the first year of college, which I understand to mean, challenging college credit-bearing courses, not remedial no-credit courses. Since teachers have to be college graduates, an indicator of freshman year success in four college years is useful information, esp. for the student.
Grades might have been useful in the past, but they too are getting unreliable. Check this for a recent example of how Kentucky now has serious grading disparities by race: http://www.bipps.org/ky-state-education-shows-serious-grading-discrepancies-race/