Three public universities in Maine received failing grades in a national review of elementary teacher preparation after the National Council on Teacher Quality concluded the programs were not adequately preparing teachers to help children learn to read. The council gave the grades as part of a 2023 analysis that assessed how teacher preparation programs teach five pillars of effective reading instruction. University leaders and faculty members disputed the findings, saying the ratings were misleading and questioning the council’s methodology.
National Council on Teacher Quality president Heather Peske said the evaluation reflected whether teacher preparation aligned with “our best science.” In a statement to The Maine Monitor, Peske said, “We are not serving Maine students well when our teachers who teach in Maine are not prepared in line with our best science.”
The council rated 702 programs housed in 580 institutions of higher education nationwide in 2023 based on whether and how they taught the five pillars: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. It said Maine programs did not respond to invitations to review their course information openly, so it reviewed syllabi and other documents it obtained through public records requests, concluding that none of the programs adequately taught all five pillars.
The NCTQ said it found that the University of Southern Maine and the University of Maine at Farmington adequately addressed zero components of the five pillars of reading instruction. For the University of Maine at Orono, the council concluded the program sufficiently taught only one pillar, comprehension.
The University of Maine System pushed back on the rating methodology. Spokesperson Samantha Warren wrote in an email that the system has historically rejected the council’s ratings, which she said “ignore student and program outcomes; contain concerning methodological flaws; rely on a review of course syllabi rather than observations of actual teaching and learning; and have a well-documented history of data inaccuracies.”
In describing the council’s process, the NCTQ said its standard practice is to invite universities with teacher preparation programs that graduate 10 or more students each year to submit coursework for analysis. The council said programs receive preliminary scores before the report is released and have the opportunity to provide additional information to change outcomes. It said when universities do not provide documents, it uses public records requests and analyzes documents no older than five years, but it said it cannot rate programs that do not provide documents.
The NCTQ said the University of Maine at Presque Isle, Husson University, and the University of New England received no rating because they did not provide documentation about course information. It said it attempted to review six teacher preparation programs in Maine out of a total of 16 recognized by the Maine Department of Education.
UMaine School of Learning and Teaching Director William Dee Nichols said he is confident in UMaine’s practices and questioned the accuracy of the NCTQ report, saying UMaine did not fully participate in the data collection process because it was concerned about how narrow the evaluation data was. At the University of Southern Maine, literacy professors Andrea Stairs-Davenport and Melinda Butler said the failing grade was a surprise and said the NCTQ might have looked at syllabi that were not clear enough, adding that teachers cannot teach reading without decoding and that reading-related outcomes depend on multiple factors.
The council’s criticism and the universities’ responses play out against a national education-policy debate about how children learn to read. The review said the five pillars have been broadly used since they were released in 2000 by the National Reading Panel, an agency created by Congress. The story also describes criticism of instructional approaches that emphasize “cueing” through context cues like pictures, saying instead that phonics-focused approaches and phonemic awareness instruction are widely promoted as a foundation for reading.
Peske argued that student reading outcomes in Maine show the teacher preparation programs should be reassessed. She said the council has “50 years of research with thousands of studies across tens of thousands of kids” about how to teach reading, and she asked why test results show 44% of Maine fourth graders and 35% of eighth graders scored below basic in the most recent National Assessment of Education Progress results. She also said states that improved reading outcomes are relying on decades of scientific evidence and cited Mississippi as an example, saying it reviewed teacher preparation as part of a broader change effort.
UMaine instructors described literacy coursework as seeking to keep teacher candidates grounded in evolving research rather than applying reading instruction as a strict either-or choice. Literacy instructor Michelle Kearney said, “We’re trying to be really explicit with our students about how research does change, and we get new pieces of it, but it doesn’t push it all the way back,” and she added, “I think that’s been dangerous in our field, this sort of black and white, binary thinking of ‘either/or,’ instead of working to see how all these things fit together in a comprehensive way that’s still grounded in research.” Nichols said UMaine has been updating how it prepares future teachers, describing Kearney’s hiring as part of that effort, and he said UMaine stopped participating in the Reading Recovery program several years ago. He also said, “I guarantee the pendulum will swing again.”