That is one of the key takeaways from a report being released today by the National Council on Teacher Quality.
The report—titled “Easy A’s and What’s Behind Them”—is the latest in a series of recent NCTQ reports that takes teacher prep programs to task for how well they produce teachers who are ready to put their skills to use on the first day of school instead of relying on trial and error.
One of the most interesting aspects of this latest report is the fact that, in order to build its case that too many students are graduating from teacher prep programs with honors for those honors to mean much, NCTQ examined an unlikely source: commencement brochures obtained online.
The tactic speaks to the lengths that NCTQ is willing to go to illuminate the pedagogies being employed in America’s teacher prep programs, which have been on edge ever since NCTQ started soliciting and gathering information on their syllabi and coursework in order to launch its annual Teacher Prep Review in 2013.
In examining commencement brochures, researchers at NCTQ spotted what they characterize as a curious trend: Teacher prep programs are letting students graduate with honors far more frequently than other higher education programs. More specifically, NCTQ found that, while 30 percent of all graduating students qualified for honors at 509 campuses for which commencement brochures were examined, in teacher prep programs, the proportion stood at 44 percent—or 14 percentage points higher than the rest.
“This difference means that teacher candidates are 50 percent more likely to earn honors than undergraduate students across the campus,” the NCTQ report states. “These results provide clear evidence that many teacher preparation programs are far too liberal in awarding high grades rather than reserving them for the teacher candidates who truly do exemplary work and who are ready to hit the ground running.”
