Advocacy Group Sues to Get University's Teacher Ed. Syllabi

Lawsuit is part of effort to rate education schools

Do public institutions that prepare public-school teachers have the right to keep their education-course syllabi private?

That’s essentially the question raised by a lawsuit filed Jan. 26 in Wisconsin by the Washington-based National Council on Teacher Quality, which seeks to compel the University of Wisconsin and several of its campuses to provide such information under the state’s open-records law.

The move comes as part of the NCTQ’s project to rate every school of education on up to 18 standards. ( "Grading of Teacher Colleges to Be Revamped," Feb. 9, 2011.) Many institutions are not voluntarily participating in the controversial review, and are turning over materials only in response to open-records requests filed by the council, a private nonprofit...