Again for 2020, ASU’s Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College ranks among the best

ASU’s Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College placed No. 16 among 392 institutions surveyed in U.S. News & World Report’s annual rankings of America’s graduate schools of education. Among public universities, the college was ranked No. 7, ahead of the University of Virginia and the University of California-Berkeley. This year’s USNWR survey solidifies ASU’s ascent to the top tier of colleges of education since 2012, when it ranked No. 35 in the survey. MLFTC continues to be one of the few colleges of education in the country that excels at both teacher preparation and world-class scholarly research.

The survey also identified the following MLFTC graduate programs as among the top in the country:

• Education Policy: 21
• Higher Education: 19
• Special Education: 18
• Secondary Education: 16
• Curriculum and Instruction: 13
• Elementary Education: 11

“It’s important for us to be excellent across the board,” said Carole Basile, dean of Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College, “and to maintain excellence in doing the things that colleges of education have traditionally done: preparing teachers and principals, generating research that informs education policy and that helps educators improve learning outcomes for students.

“But we think a great college of education can and should do more.”

Basile noted that Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College has embraced four strategic initiatives to support that ambition:

• An educator workforce initiative to design how educators are prepared to work in schools and how they are deployed once they get there
• Community design initiatives in which faculty, staff and students work with schools and communities to tackle tough problems
• Working with schools to develop contextual models, or prototypes, of systems that deploy teachers in new ways to deliver personalized learning to students
• Generating more team-based, cross-disciplinary research that improves the lives of learners, the impact of educators and the performance of schools

“The U.S. News & World Report ranking is one of many indications that we are in a position of strength to pursue the important work of defining what a college of education should be and how it can contribute to systemic improvement in education,” said Basile.

“Through our core value of principled innovation, we seek to hold education accountable to three imperatives: an equity imperative to deliver excellent learning opportunities to all learners; an economic imperative to prepare all learners for the next economy; and a democratic imperative to prepare learners to assume the responsibilities of self-government and participate in a thriving civil society.”