Research & Insights

Like all of us, principals respond to performance pressures by seeking to alleviate them as quickly and simply as possible. Unfortunately, when it comes to the pressure to improve test scores, the simplest solution may be the most likely to backfire.

A recent study by Jason Grissom of Vanderbilt University and Demetra Kalogrides and Susanna Loeb of Stanford University shows that over a ten-year period, principals in Miami-Dade County Public Schools rearranged their teaching staffs in response to the accountability pressures of No Child Left Behind. Principals moved their best teachers into tested grades (3rd through 10th), presumably with the goal of improving outcomes in the grades most obviously linked to schools’ accountability scores.

The researchers found that principals were more likely to engage in this type of “strategic staffing” in schools where they had more control over staff assignment and in schools that had received a failing grade and were therefore facing particularly intense pressure to improve. Overall, a below-average teacher (with student assessment scores one standard deviation below the mean) had a 13 percent chance of being moved to a non-tested grade, compared to a 5 percent chance of being moved among above-average teachers.

Of course, moving a struggling teacher to a different grade would not be bad IF that teacher turns out to be better equipped to teach that new age range. A non-state assessment administered by researchers to gauge performance in the earliest grades revealed this not to be the case; instead, they found that K-2 students taught by teachers who had been moved from a higher grade lost so much ground that it carried over into their performance on the 3^rd grade tests, if not even longer.

What seems like a sound short-term strategy actually creates longer-term harm.

Mississippi had to do something.

Between 1992 and 2013, no more than 55 percent of its 4^th grade children could look at a piece of writing and locate relevant information or use their understanding of the text to identify details that support a given interpretation or conclusion.

In short, nearly half of these students couldn’t adequately understand what they read.

But in recent years, the state’s response to this challenge has been strong and swift:

In April 2013, Mississippi passed a law which requires, with some exceptions, holding back 3^rd grade students who score at the lowest levels on the state-wide reading test. In Spring 2015, the year the law first went into effect, 15 percent of third graders placed at the lowest achievement level—potentially having to repeat the grade.

Beginning in January 2014, the state education department launched a massive professional development program that offered LETRS training to all Mississippi K-3 educators. In target schools (those with large proportions of low-performing readers), the state mandated participation in the training and provided literacy coaches.

During this same period, the state also worked with the Southeast Regional Education Laboratory to develop a test for teachers on early literacy and an observation tool to measure classroom practice.

Recently, researchers used the results from the test and observations to examine how teacher knowledge and classroom practice changed over two years. Jessica Sidler Folsom and Kevin Smith (both of Florida State) and Kymyona Burk and Nathan Oakley at the state education department summarized their analysis, finding results that might best be characterized as “cautiously hopeful.”

As measured by the test, average teacher knowledge of early literacy skills did go up about ten percentile points, an improvement which appears to be correlated with the LETRS training.

Similarly, in the schools where training was supplemented by on-site observations, the key areas observed (instructional quality, student engagement, and teaching competencies) all showed improvement that related to the LETRS training

It’s important to note several caveats with these results. First, the study is not experimental, so cannot prove causation. Second, even after training, teachers managed to answer about half the questions correctly on average. There is still a long way to go. Third, the law requires the state to produce better student achievement results, not merely improve teacher knowledge and skills.

However, rather than end on the standard “more research needed” note, we did a little digging and found two positive, relatively recent student trends that may be attributable to these efforts:

(1) In 2015, 60 percent of Mississippi 4^th graders met the grade-level standard for the NAEP reading test – the highest proportion since 1992.

(2) In spring 2016, 13 percent of Mississippi 3^rd graders did not meet the standard to be promoted to 4^th grade. One year later, that proportion had fallen to 8 percent.

So perhaps, in addition to more research, more time to let these interventions play out is needed as well.

As students around the country return to class, far too many will find a substitute teacher at the helm. Here we take a look at districts’ qualifications for their substitutes as well as their compensation.

Should schools of education steer their students to fields where they have the highest chances of being hired? Or should they allow students to major in fields in which the college knows only a few will eventually find jobs?

Among the biggest surprises NCTQ encountered in researching our December 2016 Landscape in Teacher Preparation – Undergraduate Elementary were the substantial improvements in coursework aimed at teaching elementary teachers how to teach reading.

In 2011, Florida’s legislature passed an ambitious performance pay policy that requires districts to pay their most effective teachers the district’s highest annual salary awards. Recognizing the importance of this law, NCTQ has praised Florida as a national leader in performance pay in our State Teacher Policy Yearbook.

Florida’s policy favoring performance over the accumulation of graduate degrees is aligned with longstanding research that demonstrates that paying teachers more for earning advanced degrees generally does not positively contribute to student learning.

Recently, we evaluated a subset of Florida’s districts to determine how well they implemented this law. The discouraging results have implications that go beyond the sunshine state.

As detailed in
Backing the Wrong Horse: The Story of One State’s Ambitious but Disheartening Foray into Performance Pay, there is a clear disconnect between the law’s intent and its implementation in 16 out of the 18 districts we studied (roughly a quarter of Florida districts). Only two districts actually pay larger salary awards to their teachers who earn the highest ratings (“Highly Effective”) than to teachers who have earned master’s degrees.

Across the studied districts, a teacher would, on average, need to be rated Highly Effective four years in a row to earn as much as a teacher earns in a single year for having earned a master’s degree.

Despite our mostly disappointing findings, two districts—Hillsborough and Duval—were the exception to the rule. Both of these districts provide teachers with larger salary awards for being rated Highly Effective than for earning master’s degrees. Hillsborough and Duval demonstrate that districts, particularly those in states with strong state policies, need not necessarily follow traditional pay schemes and can instead compensate their most effective teachers with their highest salary awards.

Although
Backing the Wrong Horse only examined Florida districts, other states should pay attention to its implications. Each district in every state with a performance pay policy should review its implementation to determine whether teachers with advanced degrees earn larger salary awards than teachers with performance that is rated as more effective and, if such a disconnect occurs, take measures to correct the imbalance.

Otherwise, if Florida is any indication, districts will continue to invest significant sums of money each year in a compensation system that is not reflective of what they no doubt value most: student learning and growth.

If you’re anything like me, you can’t help but grow really discouraged at what seems like a lack of progress toward improving public education. I’ll admit there are days when I just want to throw in the towel.

I keep noticing, though, that there is actually a substantial amount of good news about American education that never seems to get any traction in either traditional or social media. I also suspect education reformers are so accustomed to calling out the bad news in order to incite action that we fail to appreciate the importance of good news. I’ve
discussed this here previously, but feel the need to revisit as there’s been a spat of generally unheralded good news.

There is new clear evidence that we are making slow, gradual gains adding up to significant change. Though you almost had to read between the lines to appreciate the genuinely good news in a recent Department of Education report,
“The Status and Trends in the Education of Racial and Ethnic Groups,” good news it was, indisputably. It cited the following progress:

• Since 1992, on the fourth grade NAEP reading assessment, the White-Black score gap narrowed from 32 points to 26 points. This was not due to a drop in white scores, which went up by 8 points, but results from an even larger gain of 14 points among Black students.
• Similarly, on the eighth grade reading NAEP, the White-Hispanic gap closed significantly from 26 to 21 points. Again, Hispanic students made larger gains than did White students (12 points compared to 7 points).
• Since 1990, high school completion rates for young adults have gone up for all students, but most impressively for Hispanic students–increasing from 59 to 88 percent. Black students made great gains (from 83 to 92 percent), with both groups outpacing White student gains (from 90 to 95 percent).
• The number of bachelor degrees earned by Hispanic students doubled since 2004. It went up 46 percent for Black students.

From another source altogether, a
new report by Richard Whitmire for The 74/The Alumni found that some of the better-known charter organizations—including KIPP, Uncommon Schools, Achievement First, and YES Prep—are improving college graduation rates for poor kids by three to five times what our traditional public schools are doing. While charters aren’t NCTQ’s core issue—we’re agnostic about where kids find great teachers, just as long as they find them—I am hugely impressed by this result and extend my congratulations to the thousands of teachers who worked so hard to prepare their students for college.

Advocates of education improvement need to start calling attention to these success stories so that Americans understand that progress is being made and that decades of reform are showing results. Of course I’m not arguing that it’s time to declare victory and go home to rest on our laurels. We can all agree that America still has significant work ahead to raise the quality of the schooling provided to all students. And the media must share the blame as their bombardment of negative news buries the success stories. But we need to acknowledge reforms that work so we can learn from, replicate, and build on the gains they produce. 

Whether you’re running a marathon, learning something new, or trying to improve student achievement, there’s no advantage quite like a head start. Unfortunately, teacher prep programs tend to squander this precious advantage.

Recently, experts with the American Institutes for Research (AIR) released findings from a federally-funded study examining the impact of TNTP’s Teaching Fellows program—a non-traditional certification route that trains teacher candidates in the summer and provides coaching and instruction during the following school year, while participants also serve as teachers in their own classrooms. Despite working under the condensed time frame, the study found that TNTP’s program has produced teachers of about the same quality as those who enter the classroom through other routes, including traditional teacher prep programs.

The seven-district study compared TNTP Fellows to other teachers with similar levels of experience (all were in their first few years of teaching) and similar classrooms (in terms of student characteristics). TNTP Fellows produced similar gains in student achievement and earned similar scores on observations of their teaching practice as their colleagues who entered through other routes. To top it off, TNTP Fellows were more likely to return for a second year by a margin of 6 percentage points (78 percent vs. 72 percent).

Our takeaway from these findings is straightforward. Given that traditional preparation programs generally have a couple of years to prepare teacher candidates, there are few plausible explanations for why their candidates shouldn’t then outpace by a substantial margin candidates prepared in a much shorter time-period.

While TNTP remains a relative bargain compared to other non-traditional programs, especially residencies (whose costs exclusive of stipends average $65,000 per candidate), it still carries a higher cost than what districts pay to recruit and hire a traditionally trained teacher.

If colleges approached their student teaching requirements with the same rigor and deliberateness as high-quality non-traditional certification programs, they could provide districts and prospective teachers with all the benefits of non-traditional programs and more.

To this end, NCTQ is developing a new approach to infuse more training into student teaching in order to increase the value of the experience for both teacher candidates and school districts. Future teachers will learn and practice additional key skills they need for success, and districts will be able to use student teaching as a more reliable, low-cost pipeline for recruitment and hiring of high-quality candidates. A field test of the program is taking place this fall. Look for further updates!

Every year, shifts in school enrollment,
programs, or other factors require schools to transfer some teachers out of their
current position at a school. But how do those teachers find a new position — and
what happens to the teachers who can’t?

We’ve long been arguing that districts could tap retired teachers to ease the transition of new teachers into the classroom. We recently found a great example of a district doing just that, Aurora Public Schools in Colorado.

Aurora designed a program to engage retired teachers as mentors, and it appears to have had strong effects where it matters most: on the math and reading achievement of the students assigned to these well-mentored new teachers. After the first year, those classrooms reported gains equivalent to one month of additional learning in math and about the same in reading after two years. Although the impact wasn’t found to be quite as large as that of the New Teacher Center’s year-long, mentor-based induction program, Aurora’s program targeted a broader swath of teachers (all those new to the district, even if they had several years of teaching experience elsewhere). Aurora’s teachers may not have had the same professional learning needs as the true novice teachers included in a recent study of the New Teacher Center approach.

Aurora layered this new program on top of its “business as usual” support, in which new teachers were always paired with a “buddy” who provides at least 15 hours of support and a mentor who provides at least 30 hours of guidance and opportunities to collaborate over the course of each year.

The program didn’t have much of an impact on the new teachers’ evaluations, but that may speak to a weakness in the evaluation process more than to a failing of the program, as the program participants were demonstrably more effective in advancing student learning. While the program was not found to improve retention rates overall, the study revealed a strong relationship between the total hours spent with a mentor and the likelihood that a teacher would stay in the district. Each additional hour of mentoring increased the odds a teacher would return the following year by 12 percent.

Implementation costs ran approximately $171 per student—a bargain according to the researchers who also estimated that the growth in achievement was likely to translate into an additional $2,760 in lifetime earnings for the students taught by teachers in the program.

There has been substantial media attention recently regarding states’ Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) plans, much of which has focused on states’ efforts to meet ESSA’s accountability requirements. Here at NCTQ, we took a close look at another aspect of ESSA, by analyzing states’ plans to meet ESSA’s educator equity requirements.

Last month we released educator equity analyses of the 16 states and the District of Columbia that submitted their plans in spring 2017. Our analyses highlight strengths and opportunities among these states’ work to ensure that low-income students and students of color are not disproportionately taught by ineffective, out-of-field, or inexperienced teachers.

Criticizing states or highlighting failings in these plans are not the goals of these analyses. Instead, we showcase states with strong elements worthy of replication and mention opportunities for these plans to be enhanced.

Of course, equity issues extend beyond districts and schools. Indeed, many of these issues have their roots in our shameful national history of housing and hiring discrimination, racism, and classism. Nevertheless, states have a critically important role to play in ensuring that, regardless of the cause, where educator equity gaps exist, states, districts, and schools must work to eliminate them.

Since research clearly demonstrates that a teacher is the most significant in-school influence on student achievement, states, districts, and schools must provide effective teachers with incentives and support to serve where they are most needed: in our highest need schools. States and districts should take actions designed to ensure that more of our best teachers are teaching in classrooms where they can help our most at-risk students.

Overall, our review of state’s efforts to meet the educator equity provisions in ESSA state plans found that some promising work is underway, but also that significant room for improvement remains. Specifically, we found that the best plans contain the following elements:

• Clear definitions of the terms “ineffective teacher” and “inexperienced teacher” in ways aligned with the best research. For example, New Mexico defines an ineffective teacher as a teacher who earns an overall evaluation rating of ineffective, or who earns student growth ratings in the bottom ten percent.
• Articulation of the specific data the state will use to determine whether there are existing educator equity gaps. The very best go beyond the ESSA requirements to include more granular data, such as student-level data, that are necessary to illuminate educator equity gaps that exist within schools. For example, Tennessee currently uses student-level data to calculate its educator equity gaps. 
• Publicly available timelines and interim targets for eliminating identified educator equity gaps so that states can hold themselves–and their districts–responsible for meeting them. For example, New Jersey’s plan establishes clear timelines and interim targets that correspond to its existing educator equity gaps, as well as with the state’s strategies to eliminate those gaps. 
• Promising strategies designed to eliminate educator equity gaps. For instance, Nevada’s Victory and Zoom school incentives will recruit and retain teachers in schools that are high poverty and have a high proportion of English learners, respectively. 

Our analysis found that many ESSA state plans include strong definitions for an ineffective teacher that include objective measures of student growth. However, many states have substantial room for improvement in establishing ambitious and achievable timelines and interim targets for eliminating existing educator equity gaps. 

Failing to ensure that low-income students and students of color have equal access to excellent teachers robs them of a vitally-needed chance to succeed. Fortunately, states have powerful levers that they can use to close equity gaps.

For example, when designing strategies intended to eliminate educator equity gaps, states should engage with the full range of policymakers who will be responsible for implementing these plans. States also should carefully review whether districts with longstanding equity issues are using state and federal education funds strategically to address any existing educator equity gaps.

Additionally, states can and should take steps to ensure that progress toward eliminating equity gaps is regularly measured. States should also implement processes for evaluating and improving the strategies that districts are implementing to eliminate educator equity gaps.

We hope that states will carefully review our analyses and consider incorporating our suggestions for improvement.

In light of this change in the layoff landscape, this month we examine how districts around the country handle teacher layoffs and which teachers are the first to go when districts face budget crises. Using our Teacher Contract Database, we take a look at layoff policies in 124 of the largest school districts in the country.

When done right, student teaching can be a tremendous learning experience as teacher candidates observe an outstanding teacher and then put into practice what they learned.

This is the final installment in a series exploring secondary certifications, state licensing tests, and the subject matter preparation that teacher prep programs provide future high school teachers. This fourth installment looks at how teacher preparation programs can take different paths to prepare aspiring teachers within a given state context.

It’s no secret that teacher prep programs often fail to teach scientifically based approaches to reading instruction. Our December 2016 analysis of undergraduate elementary teacher prep programs found that just 39 percent provide instruction in all five essential components of early reading instruction, leaving most future teachers unprepared.

Now, Dr. Deborah Glaser, a national expert in the teaching of literacy (and reviewer of hundreds of textbooks for us), has a solution — an online course that focuses on the most up-to-date research in reading instruction and strategies to support that instruction.

The Reading Teacher’s Top Ten Tools: Instruction that Makes a Difference is a self-paced, interactive professional development resource that helps teachers improve their reading instruction. The training program incorporates media-rich applications and interactive elements so teachers see how these best practices can enable actual students to learn key literacy skills.

The three-credit course guides teachers through ten tools: knowledge, oral language, phoneme awareness, phonics and spelling, vocabulary, comprehension, fluency, writing, read alouds, and collaboration models. New teachers and veterans alike will find the course crammed full with valuable information to enhance their students’ reading abilities.

For more information about this course visit www.ReadingTeachersTopTenTools.com or email Dr. Glaser directly at DrDeb@TopTenTools.net.

Data, data everywhere but not a drop to drink.

That’s what many principals have concluded after gaining access to more data about teachers’ past performance without understanding how to make the most of it during hiring. A recently published study by Marisa Cannata (Vanderbilt University) and her colleagues at the University of Michigan and North Carolina State University examines this challenge and identifies big and small steps district central offices can take to remedy the problem. Namely, the study highlights the need for districts to communicate about data availability and help principals use data to complement their professional judgment.

The researchers surveyed nearly 800 principals in multiple districts and followed up with a selection of interviews. Many principals are proactive in their approach to gathering relevant data (for example, they may ask applicants to bring previous teacher evaluations with them) and systematic in their approach to assessing a teacher’s fit within their school. One principal describes a clever way to use his district’s evaluation rubric for demonstration lessons:

Other principals may not be as willing to go the extra mile to collect relevant data. In one district, a principal explained that while she didn’t automatically have access to all the data she would like, reaching out to the district office to get that information was quick and easy. A fellow principal in the same district couldn’t say the same—

Districts still have work to do to get principals on the same page about data quality and limitations, particularly when it comes to value-added data. As one VAM-skeptical principal explains:

If this study makes one thing clear, it’s that the distance between data collection and data use is long; bridging that gap will require comprehensive support and ongoing input from building leaders.

As has been previously detailed, secondary certification is a hot mess, and looking at state-mandated licensing tests adds yet another layer of complexity.

Over the last few months, a whole bunch of states — including Arizona, Minnesota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Utah, New York, and Wisconsin — have tried to lower their requirements for becoming a teacher, even if not all succeeded in doing so.

New York’s decision to lower its entry standards is the most disturbing—in part because the state previously had made such exemplary progress on this issue under John King, its former education chief, and Merryl Tisch, former chancellor of the State Board of Regents. They not only improved and expanded New York’s licensing tests to more accurately reflect the skills every teacher needs, they also put in place a top notch accountability system on a public NY State Data website. This enabled consumers to find an array of educational data, including which institutions of higher education were doing a good job preparing their teacher candidates for the state’s licensing tests.

One of the safeguards New York had installed was a literacy test, measuring teachers’ ability to read critically and write using evidence. Yet the new state leadership recently elected to throw out this test.

And that new accountability system? First the state wiped all the data, leaving the sad bones of the once informative site (as shown above).

These moves have about as much justification behind them as the rationales put forward for exiting the Paris climate accord.

Unlike other states, New York’s decision wasn’t inspired by a panic over teacher shortages. Quite the reverse. Routinely, only about one in five people in New York who qualify to be teachers actually takes a teaching job in the state, a level of overproduction that’s been going on for years.

The sorry truth behind the move is that too many teacher candidates were failing the test (the pass rate in 2013-14 was 68 percent), raising awkward questions about the quality of aspiring teachers and embarrassing many of New York’s colleges and universities charged with training these candidates.

Talk about killing the messenger.

From the get go, higher education institutions have been putting a lot of pressure on the state to abandon the test. Even my good friend and colleague TNTP head Dan Weisberg (also a big provider of teachers), in this op-ed, publicly opposed the test for being “unproven” and for its harsh impact on diversity, arguing instead for a system that puts up few hoops at the point of entry.

I wonder which poor kids get to be the guinea pigs while unscreened teachers prove their mettle. Anyway, I will concede that Weisberg wasn’t exaggerating about the impact of tests on the diversity of the teaching pool. The already low pass-rates on the New York test plummet for Hispanic (down to 46 percent) and black teacher candidates (down to 41 percent).

But those drops are not unusual. Every standardized test taken by American school children reports similarly distressing gaps, largely the result of a far higher percentage of students of color who lack equal access to quality educators. In most instances, educators work hard to close the gap in educational opportunities that give rise to the Achievement Gap. In New York’s case, it just kills the test.

New York officials defended the decision, asserting that the test was biased and that its content was not related to the skills teachers need — because apparently we now have to prove that teachers need to be able to read and write to teach! It was a risky stand as a federal district judge had issued a ruling that the literacy test did in fact evaluate necessary skills for teaching, ruling out a charge of bias.

Mostly, opponents of the test are going with this stock answer: the test was simply “unnecessary.” A bachelor’s degree, they argued, should serve as enough evidence that the graduate is literate. I certainly wish that it were so, but given the low pass-rates on this test as just one data point among many, that’s an assertion that’s hard to defend.

Perhaps the test was too difficult? In fact it was no more difficult than the state’s English language arts test for high school students. This is a dizzying, Kafkaesque argument: the notion that teachers don’t have to possess the same skills as those demonstrated by their own students.

Currently, providers and school districts are facing enormous pressure to recruit and hire teachers of color, pressure that is exacerbated by the very short supply of such teachers, as we have written about here. The wrong response is to lower standards. The right response is to overhaul teacher pay structures and elevate the status of education as a choice of college major from its current sorry state. That happens by making it harder, not easier to enter the profession.

While there is good research describing the benefits of matching teacher and student race, let’s remember that those benefits are based on studies involving black and white teachers of otherwise comparable ability. Any benefits from matching race are erased when we no longer make our first priority the effectiveness of a teacher or our best estimates about who will be effective. While it’s uncomfortable to push back for fear of appearing insensitive to real problems of educational inequity, we must insist on prioritizing what’s best for students—having the most skilled teacher.

This month, District Trendline asks the question “Just how common is differentiated pay for teachers?” To answer, we look at two common types of differentiated pay: more compensation either for teaching a hard-to-staff subject or for teaching in high-needs schools.

A good secondary teacher prep program has two basic functions: first, to ensure that teacher candidates graduate knowing the content of the subject in which they will become certified; and second, to ensure that they also know how to teach this content.

For all our efforts to understand the science behind learning and effective instruction, it can be easy to forget the most basic prerequisite for school success: showing up.

For obvious reasons, student attendance makes a difference in how much students learn and the likelihood that they will graduate from high school. A recent study by Stanford’s Jing Liu and Susanna Loeb (yes, it’s all Susanna Loeb this TQB!) examines how teachers influence student attendance rates. Their work reveals that for some students, having teachers who encourage good attendance can mean the difference between dropping out or walking proudly across the graduation stage.

Looking at middle and high school attendance in a large California district, and controlling for factors such as time of day, achievement, and past attendance rates, they found clear evidence that teachers vary significantly in their ability to motivate students to come to class. Their work suggests that teachers who regularly have full classes one year are very likely to have high student attendance in subsequent years. This is not by chance: there is something about these teachers that enables them to engage their students year after year. The effects aren’t massive—after all, most students recognize their need to attend class regardless of who is teaching—but they do translate into a meaningful reduction in dropout rates.

So, what can we do with this piece of information? Most teachers would bristle at any suggestion that they be evaluated, even in small part, on the basis of their students’ attendance. There is, however, some clear momentum for increased accountability at the school level. Connecticut, Delaware, the District of Columbia, Illinois, Massachusetts, New Mexico, and Tennessee, among others, all plan to use chronic student absenteeism as one way to gauge school performance, and we’re eager to see what lessons we’ll learn along the way.

We’ve long been excited about the wealth of information – and its potential uses – coming from Tennessee’s teacher prep report cards (see here and here). The state’s Department of Education is bringing that potential to life, as they describe in this new report.

The highlights: the state is collecting a ton of data on both their prep programs and what’s happening in their K-12 school districts. Even better, they’re thinking strategically about how to use all those data – including incorporating their report cards (which you can find here) into the teacher prep program approval process and integrating teacher prep data and school district data so that the two systems can work in concert.

Why does all this matter? Whereas other states are concerned about teacher shortages without much information on where or why those shortages are happening, Tennessee is able to say with confidence that while there’s a decline in the number of grads from their teacher prep programs, “the bulk of this decline has been in the number of veteran teachers obtaining additional degrees rather than in the number of new teachers entering the profession.” Moreover, the state can identify the specific subjects in which they have a surplus (English language arts) and where they have a shortage (ESL, world languages, and science) and in which types of schools these shortages are most pressing (those in high-poverty districts) – so that they can target solutions to these very clearly defined problems.

And it gets better. The report outlines specific ways they want school districts and prep programs to learn from these data and to work together. For example, the state provides detailed information (beyond what’s publicly available) on prep programs’ graduates’ placement, retention, and performance – including information from their classroom observations – that those programs can use to guide improvement. The state also urges school districts to project their teacher staffing needs further in advance and to share that information with prep programs so that programs can recruit the types of teachers that districts want to hire and direct those aspiring teachers to the districts that need them.

We can’t help but point out one area for improvement – Tennessee’s public-facing report cards don’t distinguish data by program. They would be even better if they showed, for example, if hiring and retention rates are different for elementary versus secondary prep programs at an institution, or if the undergrad or graduate programs tend to produce more effective teachers.

But, we’re not ones to let the perfect be the enemy of the good – and we certainly see a lot of good in what Tennessee is up to.

NCTQ’s new report on teacher prep programs provides an updated perspective on how well some 700 colleges and universities are preparing high school teachers. While it is certainly no easier to teach high school than to teach 1st graders, our results certainly appear to indicate that the recipe for preparing a high school teacher is at least more straightforward.

Get this fun fact. In our ratings, only 6 percent of the high school programs got a D or an F, compared to 52 percent of the undergraduate elementary programs we rated most recently.

Hmmm. Why does there appear to be more consensus among programs for preparing their high school teachers? Or perhaps the reverse is more telling: why are there so many really weak elementary programs?

Here’s what comes to mind. There’s certainly much more agreement about how to prepare a high school teacher, with many fewer ideological debates over pedagogy, debates that are rampant at the elementary level (and which lead so many programs to feel justified rejecting what is scientifically based).

Some version of this equation is what most programs appear to follow. For example, we seldom found a program that rejected the premise that high school teachers should earn a major in their subject, and in fact 99 percent of programs preparing English and mathematics teachers require as much.

Further, all programs do provide a methods course, though there is a sizeable percentage (a quarter) that fail to provide a methods course specific to a subject area.

All do provide practice student teaching — though it is the rare program that sets any expectation for its being high quality practice.

So if there aren’t a lot of wacky ideas out there derailing secondary programs, why are so many programs still struggling?

Much of the struggle can’t be blamed on programs but on states and schools that prioritize staffing flexibility over quality in filling such challenging teaching areas as those that fall under the umbrella of “general science” and “general social studies.” Some 48 states and DC, likely at the behest of their districts, provide at least some pathways into teaching which essentially require teachers in these areas to know enough to be able to teach cell structure, botany, and astronomy or, in the case of social studies, economics, Ancient African kingdoms, and civics.

Given STEM teacher shortages, high schools’ desire for the staffing flexibility is understandable, but allowing teachers to teach subjects not adequately covered in their college preparation is not a solution tolerated in other countries. Why is it possible for other nations to staff their classrooms appropriately, but not for us to do the same?

Actually, the fact that so many programs do a lot of things well, just not systematically well across all subject areas, makes some of our findings surprising. Four out of five programs (82 percent) earn an A in their approach to preparing science teachers in their content. Fewer do so for their social studies teachers, but still a majority (65 percent). On teaching, three fourths of teacher prep programs (76 percent) earn an A for requiring methods courses specific to a subject area. It’s just that when we look at the intersection of content and methods, we learn that only 42 percent systematically show future teachers both what to teach and how to teach it.

Looking at program performance across the board, our big takeaway is that the preparation of high school teachers is a big leaky bucket. Programs equip future science and social studies teachers with less content, compared to the almost uniformly higher expectations the same institutions have for future English and mathematics teachers. The nature of these overly broad subjects presents a challenge, but should not serve as an obstacle.

Teaching is a highly challenging, but extremely vital, career. Teacher preparation programs can do more to ready future elementary and secondary teachers for excellence from their first day in the classroom. Our nation’s students — and those willing to devote their careers to educating them — deserve no less.

With today’s release of NCTQ’s newest teacher prep ratings, we single out 16 programs as the “Top Tier.” These programs at the top of our rankings are the best places to go to become a high school teacher.

This Top Tier list shows that the expensive big name schools are not always the best places to go to become teachers.

Top Tier programs are at the 98th and 99th percentiles of over 700 programs. They have solid admission standards, provide sufficient preparation in each candidate’s intended subject area, and show them how best to teach that subject. Many also do well in teaching how to manage a classroom and provide plenty of high quality practice opportunities. These are programs that understand their most important job is to deliver well prepared teachers to classrooms. They pay a lot of attention to the nuts and bolts of what it takes to become an effective teacher.