Teacher Prep Programs: Why Run, When Everyone Else is Walking?

If
you want to judge the quality of a teacher prep program, one approach is
obvious: examine whether the teachers who graduate from that program actually
help students learn.

Easier
said than done. Many factors affect whether a teacher will succeed in the
classroom, and determining how training factors into that success requires more
data and statistical power than is typically available. That’s one of the
reasons that academic researchers, states, accreditation agencies, and NCTQ’s Teacher Prep
Review assess prep programs
mainly by measuring the program features known to influence teacher
quality—such as admissions standards and what teacher candidates are being
taught about reading instruction.

A
new study
from Paul T. von Hippel (UT-Austin) and his colleagues is among the most
promising of the few studies that have sought to measure the direct impact of
individual prep programs on student learning. Thanks to cooperation with the
Texas Education Agency, he was able to examine outcomes across thousands of
teachers and hundreds of thousands of students in the nation’s second-largest
state.

Unfortunately,
even with this much data, they turned up little new evidence that one teacher
prep program is better than another.

Given
the impressive load of data that von Hippel et al. had at their disposal, this
conclusion raises some red flags. The data set is unprecedented in size and
includes a diverse set of traditional and alternative prep programs. Given this
variety, it is reasonable to expect to be able to pinpoint at least a few
obviously high or low performers. Instead, we see more evidence that many of
the challenges in teacher prep likely exist across the board. It’s a finding
not unlike NCTQ’s own much different scan of the landscape in which 80 percent
of all teacher prep programs earned scores classifying them as weak or failing. 

The
study authors use these results to warn policymakers against using student
outcomes data to make decisions about program expansion and closure, reasoning
that the programs were all too similar for anyone to be sure they were singling
out the right ones. We’re hoping Texas policymakers will start asking a new
question: Why are programs continuing to
operate without clear and specific standards for what teachers should know and
be able to do?