If state leaders like Gov. Bob McDonnell want to start grading schools, perhaps they should first take a look at the state’s teacher training standards.
The Old Dominion scored an embarrassing “D-Plus” overall and a “C-Minus” for teacher preparation in the recently released 2012 National Council on Teacher Quality’s State Teacher Policy Yearbook, landing it in the middle of the national pack. Virginia earned the same scores from the education policy group last year.
The report laid blame largely with the Virginia Board of Education, pointing out the state’s low admissions requirements for education schools, lack of rigorous testing for teacher candidates, and failure to hold teaching colleges accountable for the teachers they graduate, among other things.
“We force our new teachers to figure it out when they get into the classroom, rather than preparing them well,” Sandi Jacobs, the NCTQ’s vice president and managing director for state policy, told online news service Watchdog.org. “Some teachers absolutely figure it out, and some teachers don’t. And kids are in those teachers’ classrooms while they’re doing that.
“And particularly with so much focus lately on teacher performance — there’s a bill in Virginia right now to really look at whether or not teachers are effective — well, we need to look at what our programs are doing to make sure that the next generation of teachers coming through the pipeline are well prepared to be effective teachers,” Jacobs said.
Here’s a quick summary of how the National Council on Teacher Quality said Virginia’s Board of Education should improve the quality of Virginia’s teachers:
- Raise admission requirements to make sure teacher preparation programs admit only students with strong academic records.
- Make sure elementary teachers are ready to teach to college readiness standards.
- Close loopholes that let some secondary social studies teachers tackle subjects they may not know.
- Eliminate the current K-12 license for special education that is too broad and doesn’t adequately cover grade-level content across elementary, middle and high school levels.
- Require teacher candidates to spend at least 10 weeks doing student teaching under the mentorship of measurably successful teachers.
- Hold teacher preparation schools accountable for the quality of teachers they produce.
The Virginia Education Association, the state’s largest public-sector union representing 60,000-plus educators, refused to comment.
Virginia, like most states, has low standards for teachers entering the classroom, the report found, starting with admissions requirements to teaching colleges. Ninety-six percent of undergraduate teacher preparation programs in Virginia are “not sufficiently selective,” the NCTQ found.
Virginia requires college students to pass a basic skills test that a middle school student should be able to pass, or earn a minimum, state-set score on their ACT or SAT college entrance exams to enter a teacher prep program. For the ACT, the minimum score is 24. For the SAT the minimum score is a combined 1100 total, with at least 530 in verbal and 530 in math.
But the NCTQ has reason to tell the state to up its admissions standards. The National Center for Education Statistics shows that college students who declare an education major consistently score lower than the average college student on the ACT and SAT. Compare that to countries with top-notch academics like Finland and South Korea, where teachers only come from the top 10 percent of the college population.
Daniel Goldhaber, a research professor at Reinventing Public Education and director of the Center for Education Data & Research in Washington state who served on the Alexandria School Board in the late 1990s, said education degrees don’t prove readiness to teach.
“There’s not much evidence that an education degree is associated with student achievement,” Goldhaber said. “In fact, there’s evidence that those who have education degrees are less effective than those that have other degrees.”
“If education schools want to be more effective, many will need to be more selective in the students they accept, and all need to improve their clinical or classroom training,” he said. “But, forcing change isn’t a piece of cake.”
“We’re talking about colleges and universities, and I think it’s very difficult to get people in colleges and universities to change their practices,” Goldhaber said. “Just simply saying we need to change is probably not good enough. There should probably be some evidence about the need for change.”
Still, Jacobs said action is needed first at the state level.
“I think that states have hesitated to tell higher ed what they ought to be doing,” Jacobs said. “And really, for the most part, this is about making sure that, when teachers are awarded a license, they have the right knowledge and skills. And states have, I think, considerably more leverage than they may realize.”
The Board of Education will review teacher licensing and preparation programs this year, said Charles Pyle, communications director for Virginia’s Department of Education. But, state education leaders haven’t decided what those changes will be yet.
“There really are no specifics to discuss at this point,” Pyle wrote in an email to Watchdog.
John Chubb, a school choice advocate and distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford in California who recently authored “The Best Teachers in the World: Why We Don’t Have Them and How We Could,” said he doesn’t believe more state regulation is the answer. Let the markets make that call, he said.
“What I recommend … is that policymakers accept a range of types of training programs, but measure the effectiveness of the teachers who graduate from those programs and use that information to help school districts, the people hiring, and to help teacher candidates decide where to be trained,” Chubb said.
Email Katie Watson at [email protected].
