RiShawn Biddle on the new report by the National Council of Teacher Quality on this dismal state of our teacher training programs (both undergrad and ed schools):
So it isn't shocking that the National Council of Teacher Quality turned up more evidence of grade inflation at the nation's ed schools in a report it released today. The findings should once again focus reformers on overhauling how we recruit and train teachers — including bypassing ed schools (if not shutting them down altogether).
As NCTQ researchers Hannah Putnam and Julie Greenberg (along with the organization's president, Kate Walsh), point out, 295 of the 509 ed schools surveyed had grading standards for students that were far lower than those for other majors on campus. At these schools, the percentage of students earning honor's level GPAs is at least 10 percentage points higher than that for all other majors. Even worse, 44 percent of ed school majors coming out of schools surveyed earned honors-level GPA's, which is 14 points higher than the average honors rate for other majors. An average ed school major is 50 percent more likely to graduate with honors than their peers in business and other areas of study.
The numbers get even worse. At 34 out of 40 universities where the percentage of ed school majors earning honors-level GPAs is 20 percentage points higher than for business, psychology, and nursing counterparts, ed school students account for the top third of all honors recipients, a far higher distribution than for the three other fields of study. In fact, ed school majors account for a far high higher distribution of honors students than nearly every other major field of study on those campuses. As Putnam, Greenberg, and Walsh put it, "no other popular major rivals teacher preparation for being consistently among the majors in the top third in terms of proportion of honors graduates."
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