A new study released on Tuesday by the National Council on Teacher Quality and U.S. World & News Report called out teacher education programs for not adequately preparing new teachers for the classroom.
The report looked at more than 1,100 schools of education, and concluded the vast majority of teacher programs do not give new teachers an adequate return on their investment of time or tuition.
Schools were given a zero to four star ranking. Those that ranked “zero” received a “consumer alert” designation. Southeast Missouri State University received a one-and-a-half star ranking for its elementary school education program, and two stars for its secondary education program.
Diana Rogers-Adkinson is the dean of Southeast’s Education Department. She says the NCTQ only did a paper review of two-year old documents, syllabi and information gleaned from the website.
“They did not have any of our student teaching documents that are current and up-to-date. Our student teaching handbook, which shows that our students have eight supervision visits, [the NCTQ] indicates we don’t meet their minimum standard of five. They also suggested that we didn’t have a way of communicating effectively the feedback during student teaching, but we have a whole website set up that’s internal that they could never see because it protects the privacy of our students,” she said.
According to Rogers-Adkinson, the NCTQ’s research does not accurately reflect what the Education Department is doing now.
“Our state has made substantial changes to how teacher education will be evaluated,” Rogers-Adkinson said. “This does not address any of the changes that are coming for my freshman who are going to be education majors, which are very different standards than what this report would say our future teachers have to meet.”
The Education department raised its grade point average requirement from 2.5 to 2.75, for instance.
Rogers-Adkinson adds the NCTQ did not review many of the correct documents, and they did not provide an opportunity for Southeast to check for accuracy or missing information.
