By Gloria Romero
(From The Sacramento Bee, June 19th, 2013)
We Californians like to think our state is the national leader in policy change and innovation, that new ideas are born here and other states follow our lead.
In one area, I am sad to say, that is not the case.
California is short-selling too many of its public school students because of education programs that inadequately prepare the next generation of teachers. A new review from the National Council on Teacher Quality that evaluates educational institutions, state by state, produced some sobering results for anyone who cares about what’s going on inside California schools of education.
Among the more disturbing findings from the institutions that provided data:
- Half of 72 programs for elementary school preparation failed the evaluation, a higher failure rate than programs in any other state.
- California’s secondary certification structure combined with inadequate coursework requirements, particularly in the sciences and social sciences, showed that only 17 percent of programs adequately prepared secondary teaching candidates in core subjects. That compared with 34 percent nationally.
- Coursework in a majority (63 percent) of California elementary programs did not mention a single strategy for teaching reading to English language learners.
- Of the 139 elementary and secondary programs that were evaluated on a four-star rating system, 33 programs earned no stars and only three earned as many as three. Not a single program earned four stars.
These findings put California’s public school academic performance in a new light, providing a plausible reason why so many kids lag behind their peers in other states and countries. We’ve spent decades debating one reform after another, but almost always with a focus inside pre-K-through-12 classrooms. Maybe we should be looking inside classrooms elsewhere.
The biggest problem arising from teaching institutions is that education consumers, particularly school district supervisors, have no idea whether one school is preparing teachers to be any more effective than another. In large measure, these schools interpret their missions as they choose, following no prescribed “industrywide” standards that would allow for comparison shopping. Will a novice teacher from School A do any better than a novice teacher from School B? Who knows? We have no quality control, and the institutions are accountable to no one for the context of their curricula and methods.
That does a huge disservice to public school districts, which are always eager to hire the best and the brightest, and to the parents of school-age children, who can never be sure how the skills and qualifications of one instructor might compare with another.
No magic wand is going to create an industry of teaching schools that provide every answer school districts and parents need for making informed decisions. But a market economy based on transparency would lead to consumer choices that force change.
Read the full post here.