WASHINGTON—Teacher preparation programs in the United States have largely become an “industry of mediocrity” that routinely produces first-year teachers who are ill prepared to teach the nation’s increasingly diverse student population.
This is one of the key contentions in a scathing new report that the National Council on Teacher Quality released Tuesday in conjunction with its long-awaited and controversial rankings known as the Teacher Prep Review.
The rankings—a portion of which were published in U.S. News & World Report—spotlight an area of education that has largely evaded public scrutiny, according to Kate Walsh, president of NCTQ.
“The results were dismal,” Walsh said Tuesday during a conference call about the Teacher Prep Review.
“I’d like to remind folks that this is not NCTQ reaching this conclusion that others haven’t arrived at many times before,” said Walsh. “What is different here is we are the first to quantify the depth of this problem.”
Among other things, the report says the vast majority of programs are unselective and that a similarly large amount—93 percent—“fail to ensure a high quality student teaching experience where candidates are assigned only to highly skilled teachers and must receive frequent concrete feedback.”
