A new report shows many of Ohio's colleges of education are not doing a good job of preparing teachers for the classroom. Molly Bloom of member station WCPN in Cleveland reports.
Ohio State University is one of just four colleges of education nationwide to have its teacher prep programs earn the highest possible grade from the report by National Council on Teacher Quality.
Marietta College and Ohio Northern University also got high marks.
But the report says some teacher ed programs at Kent State University and Cleveland State University do a poor job of preparing future teachers.
Leaders of those schools dispute those ratings.
Dan Mahony leads the college of education at Kent State University and heads Ohio’s association of deans of public colleges of education. He says the council’s ratings don’t look at how well graduates perform in the classroom.
Mahony: “And if you talk to the people who graduated from our programs they would give you a far different assessment of how well prepared they were when they went into their first teaching job than the ratings that you would get from NCTQ.”
Still, Mahony says Ohio colleges of education are already working together to improve, and are in talks with legislators about changes like making college of education more selective.