U.S. News & World Report and the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) today announce the launch of a landmark survey of more than 1,000 schools of education across the country. Unprecedented in its scope and comprehensiveness, the project will rate the quality of teacher training programs currently producing over 200,000 teachers every year.
The new rating survey, to be published in the second half of 2012, will be used by both consumers and policymakers. Teacher education is a critical national issue, and preliminary data indicates that there are wide variances in the quality of programs.
U.S. News has long ranked graduate schools of education as part of its college and university ranking guides. The new teacher education review is a separate survey which will be a much more detailed examination of a wide variety of graduate and undergraduate programs.
NCTQ and U.S. News will award grades to each of the programs under review. They will identify the top schools of education in the country as well as the institutions whose program designs fall so far below standard that they leave their graduates ill equipped to teach.
Programs will be rated by their performance on 17 different standards, which were developed by evaluating the highest caliber research on education, best practices from both the U.S. and foreign countries with excellent educational systems, and the counsel of national experts across many subject areas. These standards cover crucial elements of the design of a teacher training program: from the selectivity of their admissions process to how well they prepare their candidates to teach reading, from the classroom management training they provide to the quality of their student teaching programs. The standards are calibrated for undergraduate and graduate levels, and can be applied to programs that prepare elementary, secondary and special education teachers.
Program ratings will be derived from a digest of course materials (including course syllabi and textbooks) supplied by education schools themselves, as well as surveys and other publicly available information.
What this survey will not do is rate the graduates of teacher preparation on their ability to impact student achievement. The survey will examine the inputs to teacher preparation, but not the outcomes.
For FAQs related to the study, see http://www.nctq.org/edschoolreports/national/faq.jsp
