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Former education secretary Arne Duncan has launched a scathing attack on the quality of teacher preparation courses, saying they lack “rigor”, fail to effectively train teachers and potentially put students at risk.
In an open letter to America’s college presidents and education school deans, Mr Duncan said programs were guilty of “grade inflation” and did not hold new teachers to high enough standards.
“I’ve talked to thousands of teachers throughout my career and I can almost count on one had the ones who said they were ready to teach on day one,” said Mr Duncan.
“Of course, there’s a learning curve in every career and a certain amount of on-the-job training is expected.
“But given the typical response, teacher preparation programs are not living up to their responsibility to train teachers, effectively costing students years of learning over their K-12 careers.”
Writing on the website of the Brookings Institution think-tank, Mr Duncan - education secretary from 2009 until the beginning of this year - said that like doctors, lawyers and engineers, “teachers save lives, advances the cause of justice and build stronger societies”.
However, drawing on research by the National Council on Teacher Quality, he said students at many teacher training programs were twice as likely to graduate with honors than students on other programs in the same institutions.
The NCTQ report, which examined results from 500 institutions of higher education, found 30 per cent of all students graduate with honors, compared to 44 per cent of education majors.
“There can only be two explanations for this unsettling phenomenon: either your teacher training programs are attracting an unusually gifted group of students or the standard for honors in education is too low,” Mr Duncan wrote. “We know from other studies that it is not the first explanation.”
Mr Duncan said there were signs that the situation was improving in some cases, but warned that “systemic change has yet to happen”.
“The path to change begins with the will to change,” he concluded. “And that starts with you.”
