Rosy Report for Schools of Education

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Education Week has issued the 2005 edition of "Quality Counts," revealing--once again--states' persistent reluctance to hold their teacher preparation programs accountable. All states combined report only 22 of the nearly 1,400 schools of education in the country as "at-risk" or "low-performing." Even the most ardent defenders of traditional teacher preparation acknowledge wide-spread failure and unacceptable numbers of substandard programs, but apparently no state is willing to own up to having any. Forty-five states say that they are holding teacher education programs accountable by "identifying" low-performing programs. Only half of all the states are willing to publish the percentage of teacher candidates at any given institution who fail the state licensing tests, even though this information must be reported to the feds. Fourteen states claim to hold programs accountable for graduates’ performance in classroom setting, a claim that rings awfully hollow given the cheery results."