Teacher preparation rankings

Teacher preparation rankings, Kate Walsh wants to bust up the teacher preparation market.

That's why on Tuesday her group, the National Center for Teaching Quality, is releasing its first ranking of teacher preparation programs on the U.S. News & World Report website. The nearly across-the-board extremely low scores pull back the curtain on "an industry of mediocrity," according to a report released in conjunction with the rankings.

"The field of teacher preparation has rejected any notion that its role is to train the next generation of teachers," the authors write. "Any training regimen in classroom management or reading instruction runs the risk, the field worries, of new teachers pulling from a fixed bag of tricks rather than considering each class as something new and unique."

NCTQ's uses a four-star rating system based on training programs' curricula, syllabi and admissions standards. Less than 10 percent of the programs rated earn three stars or more. Only four programs, Lipscomb, Vanderbilt, Furman University and Ohio State University, earned four stars.

NCTQ, a Washington-based think tank that receives money from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and advocates for tougher teacher evaluations, has spent eight years studying 1,130 institutions that prepare teachers for the classroom. (The U.S. News report includes rankings for 608 schools; an additional 522 will be available on NCTQ's web site). The rankings were inspired by a 1910 evaluation of the nation's medical schools which "led to consolidations and upgrades that transformed the system of training doctors into the world's best," the report's authors wrote.

The ratings come after years of public sniping among policymakers, teachers unions and educators about the fate of the teaching profession. A group known as "education reformers" have argued that because teacher quality is the biggest in-school variable when it comes to helping students learn, teachers must be sorted in accordance with their abilities and their students' test scores. Making the profession more "serious," the argue, will draw better candidates to classrooms.

Part of that drive is reforming the schools that produce teachers. Teachers unions and politicians alike have recognized education schools as possible sites of improvement, with the Obama administration and the American Federation of Teachers recently releasing reports on the topic. Read more