Throughout the education system there is concern about the training of new teachers. The New Teacher: Meeting the Challenges addresses this critical issue that has recently been emphasized by The National Council of Teacher Quality (NCTQ). The NCTQ has released a new report stating that 87 % of education schools in a recent study “fail to adequately prepare elementary teachers for the mathematical demands of the classroom.”

NCTQ rated 77 schools of education in 49 states by studying their entrance and exit requirements, syllabi, textbooks, tests, and state licensing tests, and found that the study “shed[s] new light on why American kids fare so poorly on international comparisons.” Since the 1995 world “report card,” math scores for American fourth grades have not improved, and US students are 12^th out of the 25 countries who took the test.

NCTQ president Kate Walsh stated, “As a nation, our dislike and discomfort with math is so endemic that we do not even find it troubling when elementary teachers admit to their own weaknesses in basic mathematics.  Not only are our education schools not tackling these weaknesses, they accommodate them with low expectations and insufficient content.”

Walsh further stated that “We simply must begin to appreciate the critical importance of elementary teachers gaining the knowledge and skills they need to effectively teach mathematics. It is what our children need in order to keep up with their peers around the world – and what our country needs in order to produce a skilled workforce that can compete in today’s global economy.”

The recent study, the second in a series about the quality of elementary teacher preparation, found that state and individual school requirement combine to result in “very few teacher candidates taking a sufficient number of courses that prepare them well for teaching in elementary classrooms.”

The report, titled “No Common Denominator: The Preparation of Elementary Teachers in Mathematics by America’s Education Schools,” found the following:

• The expectations for mathematics knowledge for aspiring US teachers are “exceedingly low” in comparison to other countries. For instance, one of 6 schools admits teachers without asking if they can do grade school arithmetic successfully.

• State-administered exit tests that award a teaching license assess nearly the same math skills as used on the admissions tests.

• There is no nationwide consensus on how institutions should prepare elementary teachers in mathematics.

• Few of the programs even cover the mathematics content that elementary teachers need, and only 1 in 8 schools requires a “sufficient amount of the coursework that elementary teachers will need.”
• State guidance and regulation for preparing elementary teachers is “haphazard, further compounding the variation in institutional requirements.”

• Aspiring teachers are shortchanged in preparation for teaching algebra.

The report makes specific recommendations, among them:

Create coursework standards that lay the foundation world class teacher preparation; establish higher admission standards for schools of education to ensure that only those with knowledge of high school math are admitted; and create new state licensing tests that would “essentially force institutions to prepare teachers to get it right.”