When the National Academy of Education announced a couple of
years ago that it would produce a report on the evaluation of teacher
preparation programs, we didn’t know whether to be gratified or worried. It was
clear that the Teacher Prep Review
had served as an impetus for the report. On
the other hand, the report’s steering committee was led by a scholar who had dismissed the Review
as little more than an attempt to garner “splashy magazine cover stories.“
Issued last Friday, the Academy’s report, Evaluation of Teacher Preparation Programs,
is notable for its even-handedness. It describes the strengths and weaknesses
of each of the main forms of evaluating teacher training: federal Title II
reporting, state approval processes, value-added modeling of the effectiveness
of program graduates, national accreditation, program self-evaluation and the Teacher Prep Review. The report found
warts on all of them.
Of the Review, the
report warns that programs may doctor their syllabi to earn higher ratings (a
concern of ours as well, which is why we perform audits to make sure we get
authentic documents). But while the report repeats some of the superficial
criticism that greeted the Review’s
publication, it also acknowledges the steps we have taken to mitigate some of
the unintended consequences of ratings efforts. Bottom line: the report accords
the Review’s purpose and basic
methods with as much legitimacy as the other evaluation methods it examined.
That seems to be a fairly big step forward, considering the vociferous protests
the leaders of the field leveled against the very idea of the Review when we launched it in 2011.
If our concerns about how the report would treat our work were
largely misplaced, neither were our hopes for the contribution it might make justified.
Though the report’s authors agree that the perfect should not be the enemy of
the good, no approach that they reviewed was good enough for them to recommend in
whole, in part or in combination. Instead, they ask that policymakers and
program leaders answer seven basic questions as they develop systems of
evaluating teacher preparation programs. The questions are common-sensical
enough — what is the primary purpose of the evaluation system? What are the
most important aspects of teacher preparation? How will the evaluation system
itself be evaluated? and so forth. But it would
be hard to imagine that anyone would seriously undertake the evaluation of
teacher preparation programs without answering these questions.
Evaluating teacher preparation programs is
devilishly tricky business, so perhaps concrete and detailed guidance is too
much to ask. But one cannot help wondering whether the report’s questions to
evaluators constitute yet another delaying tactic by a field that seems
unwilling to acknowledge the urgency of scrutinizing how tomorrow’s teachers
are trained.
