Findings: Preparation efficiency
"Professional coursework creep," the tendency for professional coursework requirements to grow to constitute as much as found in two majors, is not uncommon in teacher preparation programs nationwide, but—commendably—seems rare among the Illinois programs we reviewed. The one exception is undergraduate special education programs, of which fully a third fail our standard because they exceed a generous level of 63 semester hours (21 courses), and another third only partially meet it because they require between 58 and 63 credit hours.
There does appear to be a considerable variation in professional coursework requirements within program type, however. For example, the graphic below shows the variation in coursework requirements among undergraduate elementary programs, with the 65 credit hours required at Kendall College being the largest in our evaluation.
Illinois institutions do not seem to have reached any consensus about how much education coursework is needed to prepare an elementary teacher, with coursework ranging from 27 credit hours to over 60 credit hours.
While we are not advocating lock-step preparation and standardized coursework requirements, the range in the coursework required for programs that are preparing candidates who arrive with the same background and exit to the same types of jobs is too large to be justified by the variations that should be the prerogative of each institution.
How Illinois teacher preparation programs fare on this standard
