Opinion

Teaching teachers to teach

It’s no secret that young people in American classrooms are often badly trained and unprepared for the rigorous years ahead.

But we aren’t just talking about students.

We mean their teachers, too.

That’s the upshot of a devastating new report from the National Council on Teacher Quality, which found education schools nationwide make up an “industry of mediocrity” that churns out teachers who aren’t prepared for the classroom. The study, the first of its kind, provides a huge service.

But completing it wasn’t easy: Its authors faced “enormous resistance from leaders of many of the programs we sought to assess.”

That is, the schools don’t want to be rated and reviewed, so hundreds of them refused to provide any data on how they operate.

Still, the researchers were able to reach some troubling conclusions. Such as: Most ed schools fail to prep their students to properly teach reading. Few expose them to rigorous curriculum. At bottom, they’re really not worth students’ time or money.

Education Secretary Arne Duncan seems to agree: “Teachers deserve better support and better training” than teachers colleges provide, he told The Wall Street Journal.

For their part, the schools, as that paper reports, say they hate the study because it “doesn’t consider teachers’ performance in their classrooms after they graduate.”

Yet it’s almost impossible to do that when teachers unions wage wars to prevent meaningful performance evaluations from being put into use. Which is why teacher quality has gone untested, and teachers colleges have avoided scrutiny. Until now.

None of this is to imply, of course, that all or even most teachers are unfit. Indeed, many are hard-working and dedicated. Many truly work miracles, especially veteran teachers who’ve honed their craft for years.

It’s easy to find ratings for the best sushi bars, movies or even doctors in New York. But it’s every bit as important, if not more so, for public schools, and parents, to know that teachers colleges are doing their job — and sending the best-trained teachers possible to the nation’s schools.