NCTQ has another report out ranking ed schools on whether they meet NCTQ’s ideas of what makes ed schools effective. As I pointed out last year, NCTQ purports to have a strong research basis for claiming that ed schools should adhere to their standards, but that research is actually quite thin and often doesn’t support what NCTQ advocates. I share NCTQ’s concern about improving the quality of teacher preparation, but I do not share their confidence that we know what works and certainly do not share their willingness to impose their preferences on everyone. Unfortunately, we do not know the correct recipe for making better teachers even as NCTQ tries to make everyone cook the way they prefer.
Part of the advocacy campaign for NCTQ’s efforts is to lambaste ed schools for the fact that 1st year teachers tend to be less effective in the classroom as measured by valued-added on test scores. According to the NCTQ narrative, if teachers do worse in their first year or two in the profession, it must be that ed schools are doing a lousy job of preparing them. If ed schools were doing it correctly, there would be no negative effect for first year teaching.
Should first-year teaching be the equivalent of fraternity hazing, an inevitable rite of passage? Is there no substitute for “on-the-job” training of novice teachers? The answers are obvious. We need more effective teacher preparation. Our profound belief that new teachers and our children deserve better from America’s preparation programs is the touchstone of this project.
And in pimping this year’s report, NCTQ’s tweeter feed repeats this same message: “If training & cert are mandatory, should be no reason to accept 1st yr #teaching as hazing ritual” and “Novice #teachers struggle = #children struggle. Every year matters!”
This, of course, is a faulty argument. Even when professionals are well-prepared, they may still improve with experience. It is so widely recognized as a normal phenomenon that we even have a saying for people who are less good when they start — we say that they make “rookie mistakes.” No one blames the minor leagues for the fact that big league rookies tend to be less effective. No one denounces the Cavaliers for the fact that LeBron James got better with experience after moving to Miami. It is normal for people to improve with experience, not necessarily evidence of their poor preparation.
But some see rookie mistakes as unacceptable in education because the stakes are too high. Deborah Loewenberg Ball, the Dean of the Ed School at Michigan opines, with approving retweets from NCTQ, that: “Airline pilots don’t say, ‘My first few years of flying I was a wreck.’ That needs to be gone.” We would never tolerate rookie mistakes among important professions, like airplane pilot or doctor.
In fact, we do tolerate rookie mistakes among doctors, pilots, and just about every profession. A review of airline accidents reports that “inexperienced pilots have a 2-3 times increased incidence of mishaps due to pilot error.” And this study of doctor errors in writing prescriptions found: “The overall detected error rate was 3.13 errors for each 1000 orders written…. First-year postgraduate residents were found to have a higher error rate (4.25 per 1000 orders) than other prescriber classes.” In almost every profession there are returns on experience. The striking thing about teaching is not that novice teachers are less effective, but that the improvement with experience is so small and basically flattens out by the third year.
All of us wish that doctors, pilots, teachers and other professionals would make no mistakes. And we hope that improved training would reduce those errors. But no matter how much NCTQ waves around the Flexner Report to justify its activities, teaching is not medicine and in teaching we do not have a scientific basis for saying how every teacher should be prepared. NCTQ is not helped in its attempt to be the Flexner of education by mis-describing what research exists and by making sloppy errors of logic like claiming that the relative weakness of novice teachers is proof of poor teacher preparation.
These are the sorts of errors that people may be more likely to make without doctoral training and academic experience in the social sciences, which most of the staff at NCTQ and most other DC think tank/advocacy groups are lacking. You might even call these rookie mistakes by novice researchers.
Jay P. Greene's Blog 
That novice teachers will perform less well than veterans in a highly craft-oriented job is clear. It takes time to learn to teach well, no matter what a program does to prepare its students.
But programs should be open to gathering evidence about how their students perform–possibly learning that their graduates struggle to get footing in real classrooms–and use that evidence to improve their offerings.
So if NCTQ is making errors by over-claiming what research says about effectively preparing teachers, prep programs are making a different kind of error in not leading efforts to use research to improve. Programs can claim test scores don’t measure everything about good teaching, and claim that NCTQ is using flawed methods to evaluate them. But then they should put forward what they think should be measures of good teaching, and ensure they are giving their students the skills that contribute to those measures and that their students really are prepared to teach. Until then, the public will only be seeing NCTQ ratings.
Good points, Mark.
I somewhat agree with Mark, yet I have a problem with “But then they should put forward what they think should be measures of good teaching,” I am not willing to let schools of education defined the measures of good teaching. Teachers are supposed to teach children what the society wants them to be taught, and not what ed schools think children should be taught.
We all agree that academics should be taught (well, perhaps excepting schools of ed :-). We also profess interest in long-term non-academic societal goals (good citizenship, support of democratic (republican?) society, etc.) but those are harder to measure in a broadly acceptable way. We also want child’s (and parents’) overall satisfaction with school. Etc., etc.
I am not against duking those out in a public sphere, but I am against giving schools of ed a monopoly on deciding what it should be. And whatever else it may be, academic achievement is certainly its cardinal component.
I feel like Tevye, but also make good points, Ze’ev.
I agree with Ze’ev. What constitutes strong teaching should be made explicit, but I see the problems of asking preparation programs or ed schools to do it. Asking NCTQ to do it also is problematic for reasons Jay has argued. But being more clear about this stuff that is an outcome of education but not captured by test scores seems an important agenda item.
The important question to my mind is not why teachers improve in their first year or two, but why they stop improving after that, and may even decline in performance as they approach retirement. Is this a pattern we see in other skilled professions? Or is it only present in a skilled profession where continual improvement is overwhelmingly disincentivized by government monopoly and unionization?
I won’t dispute there may be plenty of hubris in some of NCTQ’s teacher prep recommendations. But if there’s one area where their claims are based on a strong and solid research base, it’s that of scientifically-based reading instruction. And the fact that most prep programs neglect to train aspiring elementary teachers in the finer points (or even the basics) of SBRR is nothing short of scandalous.