The University of Chicago Urban Teacher Education Program Chicago, Illinois Institution Comment Comments submitted by: Dr. Kavita Kapadia Matsko, Director, Urban Teacher Education Program
The University of Chicago Urban Teacher Education Program (Chicago UTEP) provides a two year Master of Arts in Teaching degree and certification in elementary and in secondary math and biology education, and three years of post graduate induction support to its candidates. Chicago UTEP’s primary mission is to develop teachers of the highest caliber for the Chicago Public Schools and to empirically test and develop a model of urban teacher preparation whose practices can be replicated across the nation. The program is rigorous and highly selective; our graduates are highly sought after. While we value NCTQ’s stated intent to raise the bar for teacher preparation in principle, research in this field should emphasize outputs rather than inputs, require a theoretical framework for effective teacher practice, and link content knowledge to pedagogy and clinical practice. It is critical that the methodology and evaluation criteria needed to assess program quality be formally validated. NCTQ has discussed completing this validation process and must do so. Until then, though perhaps well intended, these limitations to NCTQ’s approach have resulted in misleading institutional-level findings. We take issue with three areas where the NCTQ review found significant weaknesses in our program: drawing aspiring teachers with appropriate broad liberal arts backgrounds and developing deep math and literacy expertise. In our view, these “findings” are flawed. Indeed, Chicago UTEP was designed particularly to address these content areas head on. Specifically, Chicago UTEP is one of the only programs in the state of Illinois that requires its candidates to take and master multiple math content courses as part of their preparation. Further, Chicago UTEP is one of the only programs nationwide that engages candidates in a systematic approach to literacy instruction for two full years. The level of clinical preparation focused on literacy and mathematics is unparalleled. Finally, it is perplexing to say the least, that NCTQ does not trust the core curriculum of the University of Chicago as sufficiently rigorous liberal arts preparation for teaching. If that does not suffice, what will? Such findings underscore the need for a more sophisticated research base and more nuanced, comprehensive rubrics. We are confident that the quality of our graduates speaks for itself, and we are convinced that these are the results that matter. There is high demand for our teachers—since the creation of the program 7 years ago, we have a nearly perfect hire rate. Over 85% of our graduates are still teaching, a rate more than twice the national average. We fully support the need to improve teacher preparation in Illinois and across the nation and hope that the methodological shortcomings in the present study will serve to catalyze meaningful, in-depth, research efforts to improve our collective work.
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