Former U.S. education secretary rips the nation's teacher preparation programs

Former U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan in an open letter to the country's college presidents and education school deans takes a firm, hard swing at teacher preparation programs.

The system, he wrote, "lacks rigor, is out of step with the times, and is given to extreme grade inflation that leaves teachers unprepared and their future students at risk."

His letter  went live at 9 a.m. Tuesday on the web site of the Brookings Institution, a Washington D.C.-based think tank, where he is a nonresident senior fellow.

Duncan, said a Brookings' spokeswoman, hopes to spark a conversation about teacher preparation programs, something he also tried to do when he led the education department.

"We should ensure that they're held to high standards like engineering, business, and medical students," he wrote of the nation's prospective teachers, "and we should only be giving the best grades to those teacher candidates who are most prepared for the classroom."

The criticism is hardly new. Complaints about the programs that prepare the nation's teachers have swirled for years. The National Council on Teacher Quality gave many of them, including the University of Pennsylvania, one of the nation's Ivy League universities, low grades in a 2013 report that was eight years in the making.

The council rated more than 1,100 teacher-preparation programs nationwide on 18 standards, including selection criteria for admission, student teacher placement, reading and math instruction, lesson planning, and classroom management skills. Local colleges criticized the report, calling its methodology flawed. Some colleges had refused to even provide data for the study. I wrote about that here.

Duncan, who oversaw education under President Obama from 2009 until earlier this year, cites a 2014 report by the national council that found some of the biggest teacher training programs are twice as likely to graduate students with honors than other programs at those colleges. About 30 percent of all students at those colleges graduate with honors compared to 44 percent of education majors, the study found.

He cited several local colleges in his letter, including Cedar Crest in Allentown where, he said, 80 percent of the education students graduated with honors compared to 26 percent of all students; Penn State Harrisburg which had a 44-point gap and Delaware State with a 43-point gap. The report also showed large gaps at several of Pennsylvania's state system universities, including West Chester and Bloomsburg, but not at  Temple or Drexel.

"There can only be two explanations for this unsettling phenomenon: either your teacher training programs are attracting an unusually gifted group of students or the standard for honors in education is too low," Duncan wrote. "We know from other studies that it is not the first explanation."

Vague assignments and grading that is too subjective are often to blame, he wrote.

He singled out Hunter College in New York for using more vigorous criteria.
The college "requires their teacher candidates to record themselves teaching on video and then later document and analyze their own instruction; this allows professors to see both the instruction choices and the candidates' analysis of their work. Doing so creates an environment of constant feedback and improvement."

Duncan's comments come as the nation has seen a plummeting number of students enter teacher education programs.

My colleague, Kathy Boccella, reported this summer that the number of U.S. college students graduating with education degrees slipped from 106,300 in 2004 to 98,900 in 2014, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

With Duncan no longer in the White House, will his words hold sway?

We'll be seeking comment from our local colleges and school districts today.