NCTQ released its 2018 review of U.S. teacher preparation programs. Employing open-records requests and online searches, the report ranks 567 graduate teacher preparation programs, 129 alternative route programs, and 18 residencies on practice, knowledge and admissions. The report seeks to determine if the teacher preparation programs are aligned with NCTQ’s standards. Such alignment, the report insists, will produce teachers “not only ready to achieve individual successes, but also to start a broader movement toward increased student learning and proficiency.” However, the report determines that most programs are not aligned with its standards. Accordingly, it finds “severe structural problems with both graduate and alternative route programs that should make anyone considering them cautious.” However, the report has multiple logical, conceptual, and methodological flaws. Its rationale includes widely critiqued assumptions about the nature of teaching, learning, and teacher credentials. Its methodology, which employs a highly questionable documents-only evaluation system, is a maze of inconsistencies, ambiguities, and contradictions. Further, the report ignores accumulating evidence that there is little relationship between graduates’ classroom performance and NCTQ’s ratings. Finally, the report fails to substantively account for broad shifts in the field of teacher education that are nuanced, hybridized, and dynamic. Regrettably, the report exacerbates the dysfunctional dichotomy between university programs and alternative routes and offers little guidance for policymakers, practitioners, or the general public.

A report from NCTQ begins with nine goals purportedly based on the “best available research evidence” about teacher quality. Yet neither this report nor its companion, which describes the original development of the goals, cites any research evidence. The report also uses the terms “teacher quality” and “teacher effectiveness” (on raising test scores) interchangeably. The report assumes reader buy-in to its goals, to its focus on test scores, and to its assumption that “great teachers” have an “outsize impact” on students’ learning and lives. Grounded in these assumptions, the report highlights examples of “leading state work” in 37 policy areas related to teacher quality, aiming to hold up these state policies as exemplars for other state policymakers to replicate. Despite its intentions, the report has multiple flaws that undermine its validity and usefulness. It offers no explanation about how the 37 best practices were selected in the first place and no justification for its selection of “leading” policy work, some of which has occurred in states that have consistently been low performers on national assessments. In addition, the report offers no evidence to support its approach and makes no references to the nuanced and complex research literature in this area. The report focuses primarily on human capital policies that explicitly target the qualifications and evaluation of the teacher workforce. This ignores the growing consensus that many other factors matter in the production of students’ learning, including supports that help teachers succeed, school contexts and cultures, state and regional labor markets, teachers’ relationship-building capacities, and the social organization of teachers’ work. In the end, the report is of limited use.

Bellwether Education Partners’ report, A New Agenda, calls for a “rational” and “rigorous” research agenda for teacher education. Although the report’s rationale is not fully explicated, it asserts that programs are “blindly swinging from one popular reform to the next” and that decades of input- and outcome-based research has failed to improve teacher education. Instead, the report calls for “rapid cycle evaluations.” Regrettably, this depiction of past research includes mischaracterizations and also omits a wide swath of relevant literature about teacher education. Further, the report does not adequately explain what “rapid cycle evaluations” would entail or how they would work to improve teacher preparation program design, nor does the report offer a research foundation for this approach. The report also fails to recognize the socio-political context of teacher education, wherein programs are often left scrambling to meet competing accountability expectations. A New Agenda leaves practical questions unanswered, muddies the waters about promising research avenues, and ignores important bodies of literature in teacher education. Ultimately it represents a missed opportunity to offer guidance to either policymakers or institutions.