Teacher Prep Review: Building Content Knowledge
Building broad content knowledge is essential to developing students' literacy and knowledge of the world, and eliminating educational disparities.
Our nation's schools employ 3 million teachers and rely on 27,000 programs in 2,000 separate institutions for training those teachers. Since 2006, NCTQ has reviewed programs, made recommendations, and highlighted the best we've seen of key elements for undergraduate and graduate programs for elementary, secondary and special education.
The NCTQ Teacher Prep Review evaluates the quality of programs that provide preservice preparation of teachers. The Review database includes both traditional and non-traditional programs.
The Teacher Prep Review evaluates a total of 2,506 undergraduate and graduate elementary, secondary, and special education programs offered by education schools in 1,120 public and private institutions of higher education.
The Teacher Prep Review also examines 129 alternate route programs and 18 residencies leading to elementary and secondary certification.
The university- and college-based preparation programs evaluated by Teacher Prep Review are responsible for producing 99 percent of traditionally prepared teachers. The approximately 240 institutions that produce fewer than 20 teachers annually (and together produce less than 1 percent of the nation's public school teacher candidates) are not included in the sample. The number of alternative route and residency programs included in the Review has almost doubled since non-traditional programs were first included in 2014. We continue to expanding our reach to include even more traditional and alternative certification programs.
Programs | Public (502)1,233 Programs | Private (600)1,273 Programs |
---|---|---|
Undergraduate Elementary | 395 | 477 |
Graduate Elementary | 122 | 144 |
Undergraduate Secondary | 369 | 452 |
Graduate Secondary | 175 | 161 |
Undergraduate Special Education | 94 | 20 |
Graduate Special Education | 78 | 19 |
NCTQ reviews elementary teacher preparation programs against seven research-based standards that are proven to have the greatest impact on teacher effectiveness and student learning outcomes.
Institutional pass rates on elementary content licensure tests provide key insights on ways to better support aspiring teachers.
Building broad content knowledge is essential to developing students' literacy and knowledge of the world, and eliminating educational disparities.
Improving instruction in elementary mathematics is critical to supporting better academic and life outcomes for our students.
New data examines the enrollment diversity and entry requirements for more than 1,250 teacher preparation programs.