Today, NCTQ is honored to announce that two more state superintendents — Arizona's John Huppenthal and Iowa's Jason Glass — and 19 education advocacy organizations from around the country have endorsed our national review of teacher prep.
Like the Chiefs for Change, who endorsed the review earlier this month, these superintendents and organizations are primarily focused on state-level, PK-12 issues. But the question of how best to prepare teachers for success in the classroom resonates widely throughout the entire sector. As Dr. Glass wrote, "Through identifying the fundamental aspects of quality that every new educator should have in a preparation experience, we can raise the bar on educator quality and focus our institutions of higher education on meaningful improvement."
Moreover, there's an increasing awareness that improving teacher quality is a responsibility that has to be shared by all institutions involved in education. As MinnCAN's Vallay Varro wrote, "[In] a time when we're asking for more accountability and transparency from our students, our teachers, and our schools, it's time to take the blinders off and see what kind of teachers are coming out of our teacher preparation programs."
While a number of teacher educators have been critical of our effort, we hope that they appreciate as much as we do that the review has begun to move the issue of teacher preparation to center stage in discussions of how best to strengthen our schools. Unaccustomed scrutiny may at first be discomfiting, but it's the first step for the sector to gain the relevance it fully deserves. Teacher prep programs now have the opportunity to seize this moment, share basic information about how they're preparing tomorrow's teachers and use the review as a springboard for their ongoing efforts at improvement.