The Alabama State Department of Education distributed report cards for the state’s colleges and universities that train future teachers and officials are impressed with how well-prepared public school teachers are.
These are the first report cards issued by the state since 2009. Colleges and universities didn’t receive letter grades on the report cards, but received numbers related to three procedures of teacher preparation: the percent of students who pass the required teacher tests; survey results from first-year teachers regarding how prepared they felt for that school year and survey results from the principal of the school that hired a first-year teacher, according to AL.com.
Alabama State Superintendent Eric Mackey said he was pleased with the results, and met with the deans of the colleges of education on Sept. 7 to discuss how they can do better preparing teacher candidate’s how to teach elementary mathematics, social studies and science classes; something that’s taught outside of the colleges of education.
“It is pretty clear that the challenges that we have are in those core courses taught outside the colleges of education,” Mackey said. “The question is whether those college classes are giving teacher candidates enough of a depth of content knowledge to then go and teach those subjects.”
The report cards are based off of test score and survey results from first-year teachers in 26 public and private colleges of education during the 2016-17 school year. Results were separated by bachelor’s-level (Class B) and master’s-level (Class A) students.
To see the results for the 26 Alabama public and private colleges of education’s report cards, click here.
Monica Levitan can be reached at [email protected]. You can follow her on Twitter @monlevy_.
