NCTQ has released its new Student Teaching in the United States Report, where my institution’s performance is rated as weak. The report actually does not explain why, but here is NCTQ’s assessment of our performance emailed directly to us. You can see that we did fine on three out of five of their self-appointed standards. The Appendix to the NCTQ report containsour comment on these findings.
AACTE released its critique of the report, which I find pretty accurate. As I have written before NCTQ is getting better. They have a better pool of advisors, and their staff actually started to read real research (although this particular report seems to hinge on just one article). Good for them, but the group has a way to go.
The problem they are having has to do with their own credibility. If you are bent on releasing devastating critiques of an entire professional field, you should be at least as good or better than the people you criticize. And that is, alas, not the case. NCTQ’s standards are arbitrary; they simply made them up. And while some look sensible, other are absurd. For example, they failed us for offering student teaching abroad opportunity to students in the past. They insist everyone should student teach in a local school. But there is no evidence or rationale of why that would be a problem. The main concern seems to be with the length of student teaching (a legitimate one), but the standard is written in a way to fail a lot of institutions on an insignificant detail, so NCTQ can report on shocking numbers of programs that do not offer rigorous student teaching. If you think I am paranoid, give me another explanation.
Another example: NCTQ wants us to select cooperating teachers that have proven their impact on student learning. They must know that these data are not available in most of the states, and that our profession has been asking for it for years and years. What they told me is this: “However, the lists of cooperating teacher criteria on page 14 of the 2010-2011 Student Teaching Handbook and in the "Partnership Agreement" between RIC and school districts do not specifically mention impact on student learning.” Get it? They want us to say it, even though there is no way for us to check the information. Again, the standard is designed to embarrass, not to help.
And that’s the whole problem here: you can be a political attack dog, or you can be a civic-minded watchdog, but not both. Those two functions do not mix well, and you cannot chart a middle course. If you deal with political enemies, you can trick them to produce whatever impressive staistics. But if you want to help a particular industry or profession to improve, those tricks are counter-productive.
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