Mercedes Schneider here reviews the controversial NCTQ report.

Having reviewed the members of the board, she concludes that NCTQ is uniquely unqualified to pass judgement on the nation’s colleges of education.

NCTQ is not a research organization. It is not a think tank. It is not a professional organization. It is an advocacy group and few of its board members have ever taught or have any direct knowledge of teaching or teacher preparation.

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.

Aaron Pallas is a sociologist at Teachers College, Columbia University, who is one of our nation’s best scholars of education. He is quick to spot Bunkum.

He said this about the report on teacher preparation programs by NCTQ:

“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?”

Pallas noted that the Washington Post published an editorial praising the report. He commented: “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.”

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.”