In K-12 education, teachers grade students all day, every day. Therefore, educators in classrooms and professors of education understand the stains and shortcomings of grading better than perhaps anyone else in America.
It should come as no surprise, then, that The New York Times recently ran an article titled “Teachers’ Colleges Upset By Plan to Grade Them.”
The article states that U.S. News and World Report “is planning to give A through F grades to more than 1,000 teachers’ colleges,” and most are not pleased about it.
One only has to listen to the man with the highest authority in the education community, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, to understand the inadequacies of our education colleges.
Speaking in 2009 at Columbia University’s Teachers College, Duncan said, “By almost any standard, many if not most of the nation's 1,450 schools, colleges and departments of education are doing a mediocre job of preparing teachers for the realities of the 21st century classroom.”
Grading education colleges fairly would help principals and school districts navigate the recent graduates of our education colleges. Of course, an unfair grading structure would help none of the parties involved.
The rubric that will be used to grade education colleges unfortunately leaves much to be desired. For instance, evaluating colleges based on textbook choice and “admission selectivity” is simply misguided.
As a current student teacher, it took little time for me to realize that past textbooks and my GPA in education courses mean rather little in a high school classroom.
Rather than grading teacher colleges on a superficial scorecard, we must do so on what they contribute to the education community.
There are multiple ways to do this. First and foremost, we need to effectively grade teachers in the field. Without this, teachers’ colleges will have a hard time assessing the profession and themselves.
Professional educators have a full plate, and setting up a week or month-long unit with specific lesson plans for every day would be more fulfilling for students — and more productive for our education system — than being told to construct a random future project or test.
With such vast resources available from endowments for bright and capable students, it is incredible that these institutions are not successfully used to help reform schools in the real world.
Determining which colleges are leading the way in training teachers will benefit teachers’ colleges and K-12 schools everywhere. Once the best-known practices are established and tested for their output (i.e., which colleges produce the best teachers), all education institutions are likely to fall in line.
With a fair report card out on education colleges, we can begin to understand how to train the best teachers. This is change education colleges ought to believe in, not skip class on.
Contact Zach at zlevinep@asu.edu
