A recent study done by the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) puts NIU’s College of Education near the bottom when it comes to teacher preparation in the state of Illinois.

As a whole, the average scores for Illinois education colleges were at or below average. Including Illinois State University (ISU), which graduates the highest number of teachers, ranks among the weakest in the study.

The study, which took 14 months to complete, graded 111 undergraduate and graduate programs from 53 Illinois education schools on the same two categories: Elementary Teacher Preparation and Special Education Teacher Preparation.

Connie Fox, acting associate dean for NIU’s College of Education, said NCTQ’s review is inconsistent when compared to nationally recognized evaluations, such as the National Council for Accreditation for Teacher Education (NCATE).

“We look at our programs all the time,” Fox said. “We have just been through an accreditation and at least in the College of Education every one of our programs was nationally recognized.”

A statement, posted on NIU’s College of Education website, written on behalf of all the Illinois education preparation schools compared NTCQ’s review to “evaluating the quality of restaurants by only requesting that menus be mailed to the evaluator-without sampling the food or visiting the site.”

NCTQ President Kate Walsh said the study was a menu look at what Illinois schools require for undergraduate and graduate students.

“We are looking at the design and structure,” Walsh said. “We are not saying Illinois can’t produce good teachers. They certainly have. What this study is saying is that they are just not as good as they could be.”

NIU Vice Provost Earl “Gip” Seaver, who works with the deans of colleges to coordinate teacher certification, said NTCQ never asked about output data from the university and never interviewed any faculty.

Seaver said NCATE officials visited the university on Oct. 24-26.

Seaver criticized the NTCQ’s standards in evaluating teacher preparation.

“When you establish standards, you generally put them out for peer review to make sure they don’t have a bias view,” Seaver said. “That clearly was not the case here.”

Walsh said in a conference call Tuesday that she agreed that output data was essential, but said Illinois is not required to have any output data until 2018.

“We found it little disingenuous that they care about the output but it won’t be ready for another 8 years,” she said.

Walsh said the review on Illinois schools was the most comprehensive report NTCQ had done to date and that the state was a trial run for a national study.

The study looked at anything pertained to the structure and design of the undergraduate and graduate programs.

“We looked at syllabi, course schedule requirements and entrance and exit requirements,” she said. “We never rated a school without allowing them to react to our analysis and we engaged in extensive communication between all the schools.”

According to the report, around 3,200 files were sent by the schools of education and analyzed by NTCQ and 4,400 e-mails were traded back and forth.