University Teacher Training Still Obsolete

, Malcolm A. Kline, Leave a comment

Economist Walter Williams has called education schools the ghettos of universities and, like some neighborhoods that might be described that way, they resist improvement even when their deterioration is obvious to everyone outside their borders.

In fact, that’s what the findings of researchers at the National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research (CALDER) seem to indicate. “Average program ratings improved between 2013 and 2016, but we find
no evidence that the information intervention increased program responsiveness to [National Council on Teacher Quality] NCTQ’s rating effort,” the abstract of their study reads. “In fact, treated programs had lower ratings than the control group in 2016.”

Dan Goldhaber of the University of Washington and Cory Koedel University of Missouri conducted the study. CALDER is “A program of research by the American Institutes for Research with Duke University, Northwestern University, Stanford University, University of Missouri-Columbia, University of Texas at Dallas, and University of Washington.”