By Ben Velderman
EAGnews.org

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Now we’re getting somewhere.

A new study from the National Council on Teacher Quality is finally taking the education reform debate to where it’s most needed: The nation’s teacher colleges.

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According to the NCTQ’s first-ever “Teacher Prep Review,” the overwhelming majority of U.S. teacher colleges are doing an abysmal job of preparing future educators with the content knowledge and classroom management skills they’ll need in order to do their jobs effectively.

After reviewing 1,130 teacher prep programs at roughly 600 different institutions, NCTQ analysts conclude the nation’s teacher training programs are “an industry of mediocrity, churning out first-year teachers” who aren’t capable of reaching an increasingly diverse population of students.

The NCTQ study gave a favorable rating to fewer than 10 percent of the teacher training programs, reports the Wall Street Journal.

Those low ratings are partly due to the undeserving individuals who are being granted admittance into the nation’s teacher colleges.

“It is far too easy to get into a teacher preparation program,” the NCTQ study reads.  “Just over a quarter of programs restrict admissions to students in the top half of their class, compared with the highest-performing countries, which limit entry to the top third.”

The study will likely “drive the debate about which students are prepared to be teachers in the coming decades and how they are prepared,” according to the Associated Press.

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It’s about time.

For the past several years, the education reform debate has mostly been about on how to identify and reward the nation’s good teachers, while shepherding the not-so-good ones out of the classroom.

Those polices are all well and good, but as the AP notes, “Once a teacher settles into a classroom, it’s tough to remove him or her involuntarily and opportunities for wholesale retraining are difficult – if nearly impossible – to find.”

The key is to improving America’s K-12 schools is to produce better teachers at the front end of the process.

According to NCTQ authors, that can largely be done by requiring higher grade point averages (or college entrance scores) for all teachers-to-be. Currently, most future teachers are required to have a minimum 2.5 GPA, the report notes.

“You just have to have a pulse to get into some of these education schools,” Michael Petrilli, vice president of the Fordham Institute, told the AP. “If policymakers took this report seriously, they’d be shutting down hundreds of programs.”

Teacher colleges also have to do a better job of training future educators.

“Three out of four elementary teacher preparation programs still are not teaching the methods of reading instruction that could substantially lower the number of children who never become proficient readers,” NCTQ authors report.

“Instead, the teacher candidate is all too often told to develop his or her ‘own unique approach’ to teaching reading.”

National Council on Teacher Quality President Kate Walsh notes that teacher programs use 866 different reading textbooks, compared to only 13 math textbooks, reports the Wall Street Journal.

That scattershot approach to preparing future reading instructors is having a disastrous effect on the nation’s students.

The full report can be found on the National Council on Teacher Quality website.

The ranking of each individual teacher training program can be found on the U.S. News & World Report website.