Why and how we looked behind the Easy A’s

For nearly a decade, NCTQ has been trying to figure out how to
evaluate teacher prep coursework for its rigor. It’s an endeavor to which both
of us brought no small measure of personal interest due to our own experiences
in teacher prep programs.

We think the wait was worth it. Our latest report, Easy A’s and
What’s Behind Them, is a twofer
that both addresses the grading standards in teacher prep and puts forward a
plausible theory for the high grades.

Our president, Kate Walsh, first hit on the novel idea of using
brochures from spring graduation ceremonies as the data source for teacher
candidates’ grade point averages. (Grade-based Latin honors are often noted in
brochures.) We brainstormed any number of ideas for how to obtain those
brochures — until we realized that they were readily available on websites and
from registrar’s and commencement offices. The fact that it took over 5 hours
on average to wrestle into spreadsheets the data from each of over 500
brochures — well, that’s a mere technicality, not a deterrent.

The second prong of this two-pronged report is the categorization
of coursework assignments (be they in teacher prep or any other major) into one
of two types. One type (criterion-referenced) facilitates real learning by focusing on content and skills. The other (criterion-deficient) involves overly broad or subjective assignments that not only artificially raise grades but also seriously weaken the quality of training. The identification of these two
basic assignment types grew out of Julie’s years of perusing coursework for our
teacher prep studies. Now she feels pretty stupid for not identifying the
distinction earlier. After all, it’s so evident once it’s explained that we’ve
included a do-it-yourself categorization quiz in the report.

One more note on the personal dedication our team brought to the
analysis for this report: our categorization of over 6,000 teacher prep coursework
assignments was done largely by Christina Perucci, a very clear-eyed NCTQ
analyst. The vacuous nature of the courses Christina took for her reading
specialist degree from Teachers College at Columbia University (historically the
premier teacher education institution in the nation) is still a sore point for
her.

Importantly, our work on improving rigor in teacher prep won’t
stop with this report. The report has laid a foundation for a new standard — the
Rigor Standard — for the Teacher Prep
Review. We have first assessed teacher prep programs on the alignment of
their grades with the institution at large, but we will soon also be looking
for an adequate representation of criterion-referenced assignments—the
assignments which keep grades in balance and help to truly prepare teachers—in
a sample of program coursework.

We hope this is work that the field welcomes, having heard from
many deans over the years that they’d like to find some plausible ways to
reduce the high number of “A” grades their faculties award. We’ve
taken great pains in this report to provide resources for teacher educators on
how to easily transform a criterion-deficient assignment into a
criterion-referenced one. 

We’ll know we’re having a real impact when the
litany of teacher candidate tweets at #edmajor which boast about the low-level
demands of teacher prep assignments (coloring assignments and making
marshmallow snowmen are now coming up) begin to change to boasts about meeting
its real challenges.