WASHINGTON, USA

THE USA’s teacher-training programmes do not adequately prepare would-be educators for the classroom, even as they produce almost triple the number of graduates needed, according to a survey of more than 1,000 programmes released yesterday.

The National Council on Teacher Quality review is a scathing assessment of colleges’ education programmes and their admission standards, training and value. The report, which drew immediate criticism, was designed to be provocative and urges leaders at teacher-training programmes to rethink what skills would-be educators need to be taught to thrive in the classrooms of today and tomorrow.

“Through an exhaustive and unprecedented examination of how these schools operate, the review finds they have become an industry of mediocrity, churning out first-year teachers with classroom management skills and content knowledge inadequate to thrive in classrooms” with an ever-increasing diversity of ethnic and socio-economic students, the report’s authors wrote.

“A vast majority of teacher preparation programmes do not give aspiring teachers adequate return on their investment of time and tuition dollars,” the report said.

The report was likely to drive debate about which students are prepared to be teachers in the coming decades and how they are prepared. Once a teacher settles into a classroom, it’s tough to remove him or her involuntarily and opportunities for wholesale retraining are difficult — if nearly impossible — to find.

The answer, the council and its allies argue, is to make it more difficult for students to get into teacher preparation programmes in the first place. And once there, they should be taught the most effective methods to help students.

“There’s plenty of research out there that shows that teacher quality is the single most important factor,” said Delaware Governor Jack Markell, a supporter of the organisation’s work.

Democrat Markell said: “We have to attract the best candidates” possible.

To accomplish that goal, Markell earlier this year signed into law a measure making admission to education programmes more difficult in his state. Potential teachers must either post a 3.0 grade point average or demonstrate “mastery” results on a standardised test such as the ACT or SAT before they’re even admitted to a programme.

It’s an idea the council has applauded and suggests other states should consider to limit the number of candidates entering teacher training programmes.

“You just have to have a pulse and you can get into some of these education schools,” said Michael Petrilli, a vice-president at the conservative-leaning Fordham Institute and a former official in the Department of Education’s Office of Innovation and Improvement. “If policymakers took this report seriously, they’d be shutting down hundreds of programmes.”

Some 239,000 teachers are trained each year and 98,000 are hired — meaning too many students are admitted and only a fraction find work.

Among the council’s other findings:

— Only a quarter of education programmes limit admission to students in the top half of their high school class. The remaining three quarters of programmes allow students who fared poorly in high school to train as teachers.

— 3-out-of-4 teacher training programmes do not train potential educators how to teach reading based on the latest research. Instead, future teachers are left to develop their own methods.

— Fewer than one-in-nine programmes for elementary educators are preparing students to teach Common Core State Standards, the achievement benchmarks for maths and reading that have been adopted in 45 states and the District of Columbia. For programmes preparing high school teachers, that rate is roughly a third of programmes.

— Only seven per cent of programmes ensure student teachers are partnered with effective classroom teachers. Most often, a student teacher is placed into a classroom where a teacher is willing to have them, regardless of experience.

— When asked how much experience they have, the most common answer from teachers is one year. First-year teachers reach around 1.5 million students.

The National Council on Teacher Quality, an advocacy group founded in 2000 to push an education overhaul that challenges the current system, has on its board veterans of the administrations of Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and George W Bush.

For its review, the council identified 18 standards for teacher preparation programmes, such as instructing would-be educators how to implement Common Core State Standards, teach non-native English speakers and manage classrooms. The group spent eight years narrowing the standards and did 10 pilot studies to make certain their criteria were fair but tough. One pilot programme in Illinois included 39 standards.

In all, the report looked at 1,130 teacher preparation programmes. The students in those programmes represent 99 per cent of traditionally trained teachers.

“By providing critical information both to aspiring teachers so they can make different choices at the front end, and then to school districts at the back end looking to hire the best-trained new teachers, reform need not rest on either goodwill or political will,” the report’s authors wrote.

To reach their conclusions, the investigators requested tomes of information from education programmes, such as admission requirements, course syllabi, textbooks and graduate surveys. They did not visit programmes or interview students or schools that hired graduates, one of the persistent criticisms of the review.

Only 114 institutions chose to cooperate with the review. About 700 institutions objected in letters to council’s partner, US News & World Report, to the council’s methodology. Some told students not to cooperate with requests.

“I think what NCTQ points out is that we are probably underequipping teachers going into classrooms,” said David Chard, dean of the Annette Caldwell Simmons School of Education and Human Development at Southern Methodist University.

His programme cooperated with the council’s review and won only two out of four possible stars.