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The purpose of the Teacher Prep Review is to guarantee teachers have expertise in reading instruction (as well as other essential areas NCTQ assesses) before being trusted to teach children to read. By regularly reviewing the reading coursework provided by nearly 700 elementary teacher preparation programs, the National Council on Teacher Quality seeks basic evidence that programs are using what is empirically known about how to teach reading--so every child can learn to read. [For a list of sponsors of "Teacher Prep Review," see page 53 of the full text.]

Building a strong, diverse teacher workforce in sufficient numbers requires understanding of the points along the pathway into the teaching profession where aspiring teachers are most likely lost. Currently, policymakers, state education agencies, and teacher prep programs have limited insight into the obstacles along this pathway, largely due to incomplete or inaccurate data. This makes it hard to identify when and why prospective teachers, particularly persons of color, elect not to consider teaching or, having started down the pathway, exit prematurely. In this study, National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) focuses on a pivotal point for elementary teachers: when teacher candidates take their licensure tests on the content knowledge defined by states as necessary for the job of teaching. States generally expect elementary teachers to have foundational knowledge in English/language arts, mathematics, science, and social studies. Low rates of candidates passing licensure tests, especially for candidates of color, have become the subject of considerable debate in states across the country and have some states questioning their testing regimes. These low pass rates present a challenge for policymakers and educator preparation programs working to both diversify the profession and also ensure that every classroom is staffed with a well-prepared teacher. This paper provides the framework for the pass rate data available for each state. While the focus here is on elementary content licensure tests, the analysis can be applied to any assessment on any subject or grade span. [This report was funded by the Gates Family Foundation.]

Children across the country face unprecedented levels of missed instruction as a result of the pandemic. As millions of students and teachers continue remote learning, experiment with hybrid models, and ultimately return to their classrooms, the nation has a greater need than ever for teachers who have the skills to address the challenges ahead. Unfortunately, the COVID-19 pandemic has only further exacerbated the stark inequities of the American education system. All children deserve access to well-prepared teachers with a strong foundation in their subject area, the instructional skills to accelerate learning, and the understanding to support and inspire. As the regulating authority over teacher preparation, states play an essential role in ensuring that their teacher prep programs are delivering new teachers who meet state standards. This analysis considers state trends in many of the most essential aspects of delivering classroom-ready teachers, including the qualifications for being admitted into teacher preparation and earning a teaching license, with a focus on states' shifting testing regimes. It also examines recent activity to diversify the teacher workforce as well as to improve the quality of clinical practice. These data are based on policy information that was collected and confirmed in spring 2020. This report is the second in a series from the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) examining the current status of states' teacher policies. The focus is on state oversight of teacher preparation programs and licensure test requirements, particularly traditional preparation programs. [For the first report in the series, see "Teacher & Principal Evaluation Policy. State of the States 2019" (ED598961).]

Each year a significant number of aspiring elementary teachers, having successfully completed their formal preparation, are still unable to become licensed professionals. That's because an alarming number of candidates fail their licensing tests, far surpassing the failure rate for other professions' entry tests, bar exams, and boards. The fact that more candidates fail than pass on their first attempt, and a quarter are never able to earn a passing score, raises serious concerns--especially regarding the effect this failure has on diversity goals. While many factors going back to candidates' earliest years of education may explain this phenomenon, higher education institutions are in the best position to alter this untenable outcome. Historically, these tests have posed a greater challenge for candidates of color. Even allowing for costly and demoralizing retakes, a higher proportion of black and Hispanic candidates fail the most widely used content test (the focus of this report) than white candidates. These results are at the forefront of policy discussions because of the renewed imperative to increase diversity in the teaching profession. This report probes sky-high failure rates on teacher licensing tests and asks what must change so that more new teachers can enter classrooms with the knowledge they need to do their jobs well. To identify the most effective levers for change, the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) conducted analyses on undergraduate preparation programs at more than 800 institutions as well as 250 graduate programs and a small sample of alternative route programs. One likely cause of licensing exam failure is the profound lack of alignment between preparation program coursework and the content knowledge that states have determined an aspiring teacher needs to be an effective elementary teacher. This report will also highlight several examples of programs that have strong requirements and also report high pass rates on their licensing tests. [Additional contributions to "A Fair Chance: Simple Steps to Strengthen and Diversify the Teacher Workforce" were made by Danielle Wilcox and Dan Brown.]

For most Americans, the high school years played a pivotal role in shaping what they know about subjects such as U.S. history, world history, literature, geometry and biology. For many, the high school years provide one of the last opportunities to gain valuable life-enhancing insights, for example, reading a classic novel such as "To Kill a Mockingbird"; discovering what happened during historical events such as the French Revolution and the transformation of African nations through colonization and decolonization; learning about scientific theories that go beyond the students' own experience, ranging from nanotechnology to relativity; and understanding how numbers interact to form the backbone of the universe. Even Americans who continue on to college will focus their coursework on one or two majors, and therefore, as adults, they will rely on their high school education for knowledge about most other academic subjects. This report examines teacher preparation programs at higher education institutions when preparing secondary teachers.

The National Council on Teacher Quality's (NCTQ's) 2016 "Landscape in Teacher Preparation" has examined 875 traditional undergraduate programs that prepare elementary school teachers, finding widely variable levels of quality. Some programs prepare teachers whom parents would love to see in front of their child's classroom. Too many others graduate teachers who still need substantial assistance and experience before they are truly ready for the position they now are authorized to fill. Since 2014, programs have made gains in a few key areas, but still have far to go in others. One of the purposes of this report is to help teacher preparation programs identify which aspects of their programs need revision to enhance their selection and preparation of the next generation of teachers. In addition, states can use these findings to evaluate how they oversee teacher prep programs and to determine how they can help these programs improve. School districts can use the results of this report as a catalog of where to recruit both student teachers and new teachers and as a basis for talking with programs about what needs to be included in their training. High school students planning on becoming teachers and their guidance counselors may also find this report helpful in identifying the best college choices.

Using evidence from more than 500 colleges and universities producing nearly half of the nation's new teachers annually, this report answers two questions that go to the heart of whether the demands of teacher preparation are well matched to the demands of the classroom: Are teacher candidates graded too easily, misleading them about their readiness to teach? Are teacher preparation programs providing sufficiently rigorous training, or does the approach to training drive higher grades? [Listed appendices available online for this document: (1) Institutions' scores on the Rigor Standard; (2) Methodology to analyze grade differences as revealed by honors; (3) Methodology to analyze coursework; (4) Converting criterion-deficient assignments to criterion-referenced assignments; (5) Validating the findings on teacher candidates' grades; (6) Statistical relationship between course grades and proportion of grades based on criterion-deficient assignments; and (7) Exploring the effects of high grades. Numerous organizations sponsored this work; the full list can be seen on page 2 of the document.]

This report examines traditional teacher preparation in classroom management, which is a struggle for many teachers, especially new ones. 122 teacher preparation programs--both elementary and secondary, graduate and undergraduate--were examined to review the full breadth of the professional sequence. The following conclusions are made as a result of including lecture schedules, teacher candidate assignments, practice opportunities, instruments used to observe and provide feedback on teaching episodes, and textbooks in this examination: (1) Most programs can correctly claim to cover classroom management, with only a tiny fraction (less than 3 percent) in the sample ignoring instruction altogether; (2) Most teacher preparation programs do not draw from research when deciding which classroom management strategies are most likely to be effective and therefore taught and practiced; (3) Instruction is generally divorced from practice (and vice versa) in most programs, with little evidence that what gets taught gets practiced; and (4) Contrary to the claims of some teacher educators, effective training in classroom management cannot be embedded throughout teacher preparation programs. The report identifies the classroom management strategies that garner the strongest research support and looks at the extent to which programs teach and offer practice in these strategies in instructional and clinical coursework, as well as in student teaching. Considerable research exists on classroom management, much of it consolidated into three authoritative summaries of 150 studies conducted over the last six decades. The agreement among studies that some classroom management strategies are more likely to be effective than others helped isolate the five most important strategies on which to train teacher candidates. The following training strategies are known as the "Big Five": (1) Rules; (2) Routines; (3) Praise; (4) Misbehavior; and (5) Engagement. The "Big Five" serve as the yardstick for this study, measuring the extent to which teacher preparation programs are training teachers in research-based classroom management strategies. [This January 2014 version of the report includes minor revisions of the original December 2013 version. Listed appendices are not included in this report: (1) Teacher preparation programs included in this study; (2) Methodology; (3) Inventory of research on classroom management in PK-12 classrooms; (4) Crosswalk of classroom management models and the Big Five; (5) Cross-program analyses; (6) How NCTQ [National Council on Teacher Quality] develops standards for the "Teacher Prep Review"; and (7) Sample demographics. Numerous organizations sponsored this work. The full list can be seen in the document.]

Public schools are suffering from a well-publicized diversity problem. Minority students make up nearly half of all public school students, yet minority teachers comprise just 18 percent of the teacher workforce. In an effort to address what Slate has described as "the one cause in education everyone supports," school districts across the country are pledging to employ more teachers who look like their students. But what will it take to achieve a national teacher workforce that is as diverse as the student body it serves, and how long will it take to reach that goal? This paper seeks to answer both of these essential questions. Hannah Putman, Michael Hansen, Kate Walsh, and Diana Quintero examine four key moments along the teacher pipeline: college attendance and completion, majoring in education or pursuing another teacher preparation pathway, hiring into a teaching position, and staying in teaching year after year. They find that current and potential minority teachers disproportionately exit from the teaching pipeline at each of those four points. For example: Interest in a teaching career among minority college students and graduates is lower than whites: 95 percent of white graduates majoring in education express an interest in teaching, compared to 76 percent of black graduates. White teachers stay in the classroom at slightly higher rates (93 percent) than their minority colleagues (90 percent and 92 percent among black and Hispanic teachers, respectively); though not large, these gaps are statistically significant. The combination of these various losses of minorities from the pipeline results in the current diversity gap. And, importantly, the authors estimate this diversity gap will persist and may even grow even more acute in the decades to come. Based on their projections, the diversity gap between black teachers and black students (which stands now at nine percentage points) will remain essentially the same at least through the year 2060, and the gap between Hispanic teachers and Hispanic students will actually increase to 22 percentage points. After recognizing that each stage of the teacher pipeline is leaking minority candidates and teachers, the researchers analyze the potential impact of addressing each leak individually and collectively on diversity gaps in the future. Their findings demonstrate that the path toward reaching a diverse teacher workforce is much steeper than anyone has acknowledged to date. The authors conclude that: Achieving a diverse teacher workforce must be a long-term policy goal with a suite of long-term strategies put in place to help minorities succeed in college and to encourage them to return to the classroom to help the next generation of students. Our failure to do so will keep us stubbornly in the same vicious cycle in which low teacher diversity contributes in a myriad of ways to low minority student success in K-12 and college, which results once again in low teacher diversity. [For "High Hopes and Harsh Realities: The Real Challenges to Building a Diverse Workforce. Technical Appendix," see ED568153.]

Public schools are suffering from a well-publicized diversity problem. Minority students make up nearly half of all public school students, yet minority teachers comprise just 18 percent of the teacher workforce. In an effort to address what Slate has described as "the one cause in education everyone supports," school districts across the country are pledging to employ more teachers who look like their students. But what will it take to achieve a national teacher workforce that is as diverse as the student body it serves, and how long will it take to reach that goal? This paper seeks to answer both of these essential questions. Hannah Putman, Michael Hansen, Kate Walsh, and Diana Quintero examine four key moments along the teacher pipeline: college attendance and completion, majoring in education or pursuing another teacher preparation pathway, hiring into a teaching position, and staying in teaching year after year. They find that current and potential minority teachers disproportionately exit from the teaching pipeline at each of those four points. For example: Interest in a teaching career among minority college students and graduates is lower than whites: 95 percent of white graduates majoring in education express an interest in teaching, compared to 76 percent of black graduates. White teachers stay in the classroom at slightly higher rates (93 percent) than their minority colleagues (90 percent and 92 percent among black and Hispanic teachers, respectively); though not large, these gaps are statistically significant. The combination of these various losses of minorities from the pipeline results in the current diversity gap. And, importantly, the authors estimate this diversity gap will persist and may even grow even more acute in the decades to come. Based on their projections, the diversity gap between black teachers and black students (which stands now at nine percentage points) will remain essentially the same at least through the year 2060, and the gap between Hispanic teachers and Hispanic students will actually increase to 22 percentage points. After recognizing that each stage of the teacher pipeline is leaking minority candidates and teachers, the researchers analyze the potential impact of addressing each leak individually and collectively on diversity gaps in the future. Their findings demonstrate that the path toward reaching a diverse teacher workforce is much steeper than anyone has acknowledged to date. The authors conclude that: Achieving a diverse teacher workforce must be a long-term policy goal with a suite of long-term strategies put in place to help minorities succeed in college and to encourage them to return to the classroom to help the next generation of students. Our failure to do so will keep us stubbornly in the same vicious cycle in which low teacher diversity contributes in a myriad of ways to low minority student success in K-12 and college, which results once again in low teacher diversity. [For the full report: "High Hopes and Harsh Realities: The Real Challenges to Building a Diverse Workforce," see ED568152.]