RiShawn Biddle on Ed Schools

Here’s more on ed schools by RiShawn Biddle:

The End of Ed Schools — and Teacher Credentialing, Part II: There are numerous reasons why far too many low-quality teachers end up in classrooms perpetuating educational neglect and malpractice on our children. One is because the nation’s university schools of education do such a shoddy job in recruiting and training aspiring teachers. Another and equally important reason is because the battery of exams (including the PRAXIS tests administered by the Educational Testing Service and exams offered by the Teacher Performance Assessment Consortium that includes the American Association of Colleges of Teacher Education) used in credentialing teachers (and, in some states, even to decide whether an aspiring teacher can be admitted into an ed school), do little to weed out laggard teachers from high quality counterparts. This is a considerable problem because PRAXIS and other exams are usually the only gates available for determining teacher competence; once teachers pass the exams, they land in the classroom, unlikely to leave the profession unless a district is aggressive in weeding out laggards through the use of evaluations using objective student test score growth data. Just as importantly, the exams end up being a drudgery for teachers, who often have to take more than one exam depending on whether or not they are instructing in more than one subject.

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