Hawaii’s elementary- and high-school teaching degree programs are among the worst in the country when it comes to preparing new teachers for the classroom, according to a new report that slams many of the nation’s teacher colleges.
The National Council on Teacher Quality — an outspoken policy group that advocates for tougher teacher standards and evaluations and clashes with teacher unions — reviewed more than 1,100 programs that turn out 170,000 new teachers each year, using a four-star rating system.
In Hawaii the Washington, D.C., group looked at teaching programs at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, which graduates about 350 new teachers a year, and Chaminade University, which graduates about 90 annually. The review looked at admission requirements, course syllabi, textbooks and graduate surveys.
Two of Manoa’s programs — its undergraduate and graduate programs in secondary education — received zero stars and “consumer alert” warnings, suggesting students might not be getting much return on their investment, the report said. The school’s graduate program in elementary education earned one star.
Chaminade’s undergraduate program for elementary education got a two-star rating, while its graduate program in secondary education earned one star.
Deans of both education programs defended the quality of their programs and graduates.
Only four programs nationwide, all of them for high school teachers, earned four stars: Furman University in South Carolina, Ohio State University and Lipscomb and Vanderbilt universities in Tennessee.
The review, released Tuesday, was aimed at gauging the quality of the bachelor’s and master’s degree tracks required to enter the teaching profession. The results were published by U.S. News & World Report, which gave Hawaii’s teaching programs an overall “D” rating.
“Through an exhaustive and unprecedented examination of how these schools operate, the (review) finds they have become an industry of mediocrity, churning out first-year teachers with classroom management skills and content knowledge inadequate to thrive in classrooms with ever-increasing ethnic and socioeconomic student diversity,” the report’s authors wrote.
The $4.8 million study said “a vast majority of teacher preparation programs do not give aspiring teachers adequate return on their investment of time and tuition dollars.”
Overall, the report said Hawaii’s teacher training programs are more likely to admit lower-achieving students and fail to provide students high-quality, hands-on experience before they graduate, compared with programs nationwide.
The review also found that Hawaii’s elementary education programs aren’t training teacher candidates to effectively teach reading and math. Aspiring teachers also are not being prepared to successfully teach the new, more rigorous Common Core State Standards, national benchmarks in language arts and mathematics being rolled out in most states. (Forty-five states, including Hawaii, have adopted the set of K-12 standards.)
New teachers are in high demand as the state Department of Education alone hires between 800 and 1,000 teachers each year.
Donald Young, dean of Manoa’s College of Education, called the ratings disappointing and defended the college’s teacher training programs as meeting or exceeding national accreditation standards.
“The NCTQ ratings are particularly surprising in light of the fact that all our teacher preparation programs in the College of Education meet or exceed the national standards set by our accrediting body, the National Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education, and the professional associations in the various subject areas in which we prepare teachers,” Young said via email from New York.
“Even more surprising, last week NCTQ requested permission to post a syllabus from our undergraduate secondary teacher preparation program on their website as exemplary,” Young said.
Still, he said the college will try to improve.
“We are looking forward to reading the NCTQ review in depth to learn how we might improve our programs so that our graduates are well prepared to teach all students in Hawaii,” Young said. “We will be analyzing the report for relevant recommendations and discussing those with faculty when they return for the fall semester in August.”
Joe Peters, dean of Chaminade’s Education Division, was also disappointed.
“I feel we have a very strong program. We pretty much met all of the things they were asking for,” he said. “I was disappointed that they did not take into account the changes that we made this year to strengthen our programs. … By their own criteria, we should be a highly rated preparation program.”
Nationally, scores were dismal almost across the board, with less than 10 percent of reviewed programs earning three or more stars.
“New teachers deserve training that will enable them to walk into their own classroom on their first day ready to teach, but our review shows that we have a long way to go,” Kate Walsh, president of NCTQ, said in a statement.
Walsh said her group hopes the report will lead to reform in teacher education programs through consumer choice and that school districts will use the information as a factor in hiring new teachers.
The 800-member American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education — a national alliance of educator preparation programs, which includes UH-Manoa — criticized the report, calling it “misleading, unreliable and an effort to promote an ideological agenda rather than a genuine effort to inform the public and improve teacher preparation.”
Lynne Hammonds, executive director of the Hawaii Teacher Standards Board, the licensing agency for teachers in the state, said the board focuses on program outcomes when approving teacher education programs.
“From our perspective, as we’re really looking at the outcomes of a program, we prefer to look at what can these teachers do to affect student learning when they get into the classroom,” Hammonds said.
To help ensure quality, she said the board recently adopted “the newest generation of teacher candidate assessments” — a system developed by Stanford University called edTPA, formerly the Teacher Performance Assessment, that requires teacher candidates to demonstrate they have the skills to help all students learn.
