The National Education Policy Center published a study comparing different methods of holding teacher education accountable. Several scholars collaborated.
Here is the summary of their findings:
“Teacher preparation has emerged as an acutely politicized and publicized issue in U.S. education policy and practice, and there have been fierce debates about whether, how, by whom, and for what purposes teachers should be prepared.
“This brief takes up four major national initiatives intended to improve teacher quality by “holding teacher education accountable” for its arrangements and/or its outcomes: (1) the U.S. Department of Education’s state and institutional reporting requirements in the Higher Education Act (HEA); (2) the standards and procedures of the Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation (CAEP); (3) the National Council on Teacher Quality’s (NCTQ) Teacher Prep Review; and (4) the edTPA uniform teacher performance assessment developed at Stanford University’s Center for Assessment, Learning, and Equity (SCALE) with aspects of data storage and management outsourced to Pearson, Inc.
“These four initiatives reflect different accountability mechanisms and theories of change, and they are governed by different institutions and agencies, including governmental offices, professional associations, and private advocacy organizations. Despite differences, each assumes that the key to teacher education reform is accountability in the form of public assessment, rating, and ranking of states, institutions, programs, and/or teacher candidates.
“This brief addresses two questions for each initiative: What claims do proponents of the initiative make about how it will improve teacher preparation and thus help solve the teacher quality problem in the U.S.? What evidence supports these claims? The first question gets at the theory of change behind the initiative and its proponents’ assumptions about how particular mechanisms actually operate to create change. The second involves the validity of the initiative as a policy instrument—that is, whether or not there is evidence that the initiative actually meets (or has the capacity to meet) its stated aims.
“This review has two major conclusions. The first is that across three of the four initiatives (HEA regulations, CAEP accreditation, and NCTQ’s reviews), there is thin evidence to support the claims proponents make about how the assumed policy mechanisms will actually operate to improve programs. The advocates of these initiatives assume a direct relationship between the implementation of public summative evaluations and the improvement of teacher preparation program quality. However, summative evaluations intended to influence policy decisions generally do not provide information useful for program improvement.
“The irony here is that while these policies call for teacher education programs and institutions to make decisions based on evidence, the policies themselves are not evidence-based. Thus there is good reason to question their validity as policy instruments that will have a positive impact on teacher education quality. In contrast, the edTPA has some evidentiary support as a policy initiative, but concerns within the collegiate teacher preparation community plus state implementation problems suggest that widespread implementation and professional acceptance may be challenging to accomplish.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
This accountability plan coupled with details outlined in my book meet all the recommendations made in the article presented.
Of significance is the effort to improve education, not punish the educators. Sorry to mention my book but the answer is way too detailed to put here. Here is part of the answer: http://savingstudents-caplee.blogspot.com/2013/12/accountability-with-honor-and-yes-we.html
Hopefully educators will focus on the kids and teachers innovation that allows kids to move forward into their community. Not backward to simply take an artificial test.
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“How should teacher education be held accountable?”
It shouldn’t. Nor should teachers. To paraphrase Morgan Freeman’s character in “The Shawshank Redemption”, “accountable” is a bullsh– word, made up so that people like John King can have a job.
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Oh this is such a great reference! And so absolutely on target. Where did we manage to get so many long-term dedicated and obviously capable teachers year after year in the past — in those so many years before we started to play Big Money’s BS game of educational “accountability?”
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Thanks for giving me my standard line when the next reform minded Kool-Aide drinker I meet asks me about accountability. Brilliant! and spot on. Last year I met with a state congresswoman about sponsoring legislation that would allow teachers to become conscientious objectors in the annual Pearson beat down of our children. She politely declined and then insisted that to do so would avoid accountability. I wish I had this line then.
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The fundamental point is that the cited measurements reflect grave plutocratic overreach.
The US Dept. of Ed. gave $71 million to a state for expansion of charter schools, which coincided, in timing, with a reported announcement by the Waltons that they would spend $100 million to expand charter schools. There was ample evidence that the state receiving TAXPAYER money, for a plutocratic objective, had a history of costly charter school violations, chronicled by the state auditor.
All measurement by the Dept. of Ed. should be suspended until the Department gets its OWN house in order, beginning with schooling, in a democracy of the people, by the people and, for the people..
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The DOE should suspend all its measures PERMANENTLY. Of course the Democrats will never do that. They are too enamored with government.
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Has it been established in the past and now that there was a teacher quality problem? I would like to be convinced that the problems cited in education are the result of teacher quality. How do you measure something like this? In the past, teachers viewed the job as a long time profession while now it’s viewed as a stopping place on the road to another long termed, lucrative profession. As veteran teachers can attest, teaching, effective teaching,is a process that you don’t really get mastery of until after five years. Even after that, you are continually learning. In education, if we are so interested in quality testing, let’s do it for everyone, administrators, Ed programs, district management.
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Since the late 1990s, there has been a well orchestrated and well funded campaign to discredit the “quality” of teachers. If you hear or see the word “quality” you know that this term is a companion to some definition of an “effective” teacher, which means a producer of high test scores, year after year, regardless of budgets, schedules, and students who are assigned to classrooms, and which “professional development” fad has been sold to USDE or a state or district.
The “outcomes” only policies of USDE, states, and districts are now being thrust on teacher preparation programs.
Michelle Rhee, the New Teacher Project, the Brookings, Hoover, Cato, and other belief tanks (and their friends) are among many sources of high profile accusations that not enough teachers are of “high quality,” not enough are fired for being ineffecive. Also too many with less than a 3.5 GPA are admitted into teacher preparation. The solution: Require every teacher to have a rigorous content degree, add some tricks of the trade and anyone can teach every child to perfection.
Reporting requirements for The U.S. Department of Education for the Higher Education Act (HEA) are outcomes only. Those regulations have been rolled into the hyper-bureaucratic outcomes-oriented standards and procedures of the Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation (CAEP). Why? USDE only honors CAEP-accredited programs for the purpose of offering TEACH grants. CAEP standards and procedures are the closest thing to gibberish for one reason: They were written to accommodate for-profit and online-providers of teacher preparation programs.
The National Council on Teacher Quality’s (NCTQ) Teacher Prep Review is a foundation-funded farce, an FFF. It produces evaluations of teacher preparation programs published in US News and World Report. The method and the criteria for rating programs have no credibility or integrity, only in-your-face-publicity combined with an obsessive-compulsive approach to ratings.
NCTQ ratings of programs that prepare elementary teachers are based on imperatives. Faculty are irresponsibile unless they explicitly use, and cite in course syllabi, every one of six methods of teaching reading, falsely represented as based on irreproachable evidence. Programs MUST use specific textbooks in courses on how to teach math and how to teach reading. The preferred teacher prep texts are from Pearson. Who is on the advisory board of NCTQ? Sir Michael Barber from Pearson and the no-nonsense king, Doug Lemov, among others.
Then there is the edTPA uniform teacher performance assessment developed at Stanford University’s Center for Assessment, Learning, and Equity (SCALE) with aspects of data storage and management outsourced to Pearson, Inc. The edTPA test illustrates how Pearson has infected the teacher evaluation process, aided by Stanford scholars. I have been unable to determine whether the edPTA tests are being modified to: (a) require student teachers to prepare lessons based on recently published national standards (e.g. arts, sciences, social studies) and (b) address the fact that ESSA means that state standards take priority over national standards, reducing the role of the Common Core in the edTPA tests.
Not mentioned in this report are the USDE and Gates “teacher preparation transformation” initiatives. These are intended to remove teacher preparation from higher education, reduce the influence of professional associations of teachers organized by subjects/grade levels, make pay-for-raising test scores the national norm, offer master’s degrees by scaling up programs like those in the Relay Graduate School, reduce the profession of teaching to a trade focussed on having “essential” skills for keeping orderly classooms and raising test scores.
In addition, the new Gates-funded TeacherPrep Inspectorate system for evaluating teacher prep is being scaled up. USPrep Inspectorate teams evaluate programs with little notice using NCTQ Teacher Prep criteria.
Gates is pushing this new system.., stripped of critical thinking and scholarship about education… as THE only path to state certification of teachers. Sources on request.
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Well clearly, a TFA 5 week stint is hardly the answer. Teacher education programs must be made up of disciplinary content knowledge, pedagogical theory AND practice, and in-the-school lengthy practicums. All of this is followed up every year by upgrading (in detail, not the BS one-day in-service wksps). The Law and Medical professions require continued renewal and so should the teaching profession, paid for by a combination of the state, the school, and by individual teachers. No Continuing Educational Training? then one’s license is suspended until the CET is completed.
JVK
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I don’t know of a single state that does NOT require continuing education for teachers as part of relicensure. And to get the credit, there is quite a bit of seat time required. Your argument is a straw argument.
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Dear Threatened Out West — The idea of “seat-time” is exactly the problem. One day “seat-time” wksps for English teachers (the group I know best) is often a complete waste of time and “seat.” I know directly (through my partner, an attorney for many years) how detailed and exacting a CLE (Continuing Legal Education) credit can be, contrasted to the many lecture-oriented workshops I have attended in English. When an education CE in a day or even in a weekend is worth the same credits to a school board as a semester-long class in, say, Shakespeare, then the system is both worthless and perhaps even corrupt. Seat time be damned. What is one expected to learn and how will such learning translate into one’s own classroom? JVK
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I can’t speak to lawyer and physician “upgrading” and renewal but I do know teachers in our state must take continuing education classes to be recertified. It would be interesting to compare renewal programs across professions. I suspect they are not so different in reality. Now, if I would be paid even 1/4 of what a physician makes…..
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Continuing ed or licensure renewal programs in medicine, and law would have to be more technical, more specific, and more rigorous because they are. Excellent teaching is still an enigma wrapped in a paradox. The best we can do is to enhance content knowledge; but no serious teacher needs a class for this.
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You make a good point, but quite frankly, there is little mystery in asking an English teacher also to be a reader of good fiction, and not just mystery novels, Y/A fiction, and best sellers. There is no mystery is expecting English teachers to update skills by continued learning about, for example, narrative studies, and cognitive theory of reading. While those two topics will not necessarily work their way into a 9th grade literature classroom in the same form they were learned, a good teacher can be expected to modify his/her own learning to change and make teaching more dynamic and more interesting for curious students. It’s so ironic to see 12 and 14 year olds learn how to program computers by learning “technical material,” but somehow impermissible to ask these same kids to read challenging literature; hence the growth of the Y/A fiction industry.
Those still trying, for example, to structure a novel or play by referencing Frytag’s Pyramid are using a 100 year old model that didn’t really work in 1916, much less today. There is no mystery is continued reading & teaching of challenging works that are NOT Y/A fictional choices with their simplified vocabulary and syntax, and fictional signals that are so obvious — like The Book Thief — that they take away from 13 year olds learning HOW to read fiction.
JVK
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Honestly, they are really not going to have to worry about their “teacher accountability.” i’m so tired of hearing that term. We worn out teachers have to prove over and over and over again that we are worthy of keeping a low paying position that we spend countless overtime hours (weekends when we should be with our families), spend tons of our own money, and be abused by a teacher accountability system that makes us do countless amounts of paperwork twice a year to prove that we are “worthy” of keeping our jobs. It is now a job based on total mistrust. We teachers just cannot be trusted. My paycheck is never one penny more when I come in and work on Saturdays and Sundays. But, yet I cannot be trusted. I must prove over and over again that I deserve to continue this abuse.
Within ten years or sooner they will be begging to get human bodies to lead classrooms. I would never allow my children to go into this abusive profession, and I freely tell my students to completely stay away from it. It is not okay to treat teachers the way we are now treated. It is IMPOSSIBLE to lead a normal life with your family in the midst of this abusive career. As I’ve said…any new teacher in the midst of all this abuse…run…run…run as far as you can away from this abuse. Believe me, it does not deserve our fine young teachers. It is against the law for someone to come up and punch you in the face. Why is it allowed that teachers are forced to walk through this abuse every day we walk into our school buildings?
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Unless you’re a masochist and enjoy abuse, from kids, from superiors, from the public, avoid this profession like the plague.
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The irony here is that while these policies call for teacher education programs and institutions to make decisions based on evidence, the policies themselves are not evidence-based.”
That’s the irony of “reform” in general.
The folks pushing it (Bill Gates, David Coleman, Arne Duncan, Barack Obama and others) claim to be “data driven”, but do not base their policies on science and conveniently ignore the data (eg, about the unreliability/invalidity of VAM) when they contradict their claims and their policies.
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Irony? I don’t mean to nit pick SDP, but don’t you mean self-serving hypocricy?
Gates, Duncan, King, Brown, Rhee, Cuomo, Kasich, et. al. fashion themselves as education thought/reform leaders. Instead they may be the biggest bunch of impotent, bullshit spewing, hypocrites to ever commandeer a nation’s academic future.
Common Core, high stakes tests, and test prep – for everyone but their kids..
Data driven, research/evidence based decision making – for everyone but them.
Professional job accountability – for everyone but them
The only thing they lead is the relentless parade of FAILURE that is now their LEGACY.
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“Data driven”
They never are given
A chance to decide
When data are driven —
Along for the ride.
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“The Hypocritic Oath”
The Hypocritic Oath
Is taken by Reformen
It certifies their growth
To hypocriti-Coremen:
“The tests and Common Core
Are really something nice
But my kids must endure
A Core-less sacrifice”
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Most reputable schools of education must be accredited by the state. They must submit their requirements to the state, the state accepts that they are legitimate institutions that will ensure that students complete the course work designated by the state. To me this is a form of accountability for the institution.
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…and it really is enough.
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Agreed. Trying to tie student scores to schools using a flawed formula is convenient for data collection, but bogus.
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Early in my career work was a joy. I went to work seeking to improve my craft and help my students. I was comfortable in the knowledge that I would have a job as long as I did my job. I worked with colleagues to select courses on specific areas that would contribute needed knowledge to our teaching team. Now, everything is test driven, and effective methods are out the door for a scripted program written by people without half of my knowledge or experience. The rubrics to “evaluate” me are defined with meaningless rubrics that do not even have examples of excellence. I have challenged the evaluators to demonstrate the things they are looking for, they can not and have said so. I look forward to retiring in the next few years, I shall fight to hold them “accountable” for wasting my money as a tax payer. In my next career I may sue them for their malfeasance as I am likely to complete a law degree.
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Old Teacher, I know what you mean. After teaching for 23 years, I think what really gets me now is the atmosphere of fear among many teachers I know. Not to mention the anxiety. Teachers are preparing for hours and hours for their evaluations filling out endless forms and making sure they are hitting every point of a rubric that has been imposed on them and supposedly shows “excellence” in teaching. As if this rubric were the ONLY way. I’m not even sure it is A way in many cases. The other unfortunate aspect of teaching now is that teachers have lost autonomy and control of their classes. I remember when teachers were trusted to do their jobs and be creative. Now everything is scripted, controlled, micromanaged. I used to enjoy working alone and with colleagues to really address issues in the classroom. Now, teachers are told what to discuss and how to discuss it as if they had no minds of their own. This has been the hardest thing for me to adapt to. Many times when teachers are asked their opinions or for their input, it doesn’t matter because “experts” have been consulted and policies have already been made. I can see how teaching would now be difficult profession for a creative, questioning, autonomous young person.
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“The other unfortunate aspect of teaching now is that teachers have lost autonomy and control of their classes.”
You lose your autonomy only you if you willingly let it go. No one can take it from you.
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Another zombie reformist talking point based in ideology but with no reality backing it up. This was part of NCLB — the ‘Highly Qualified Teacher’ initiative, which, along with standard and accountability, was supposed to miraculously end poverty by subjecting public schools to the magic of so-called ‘free market forces’.
Look to Checkers Finn and the Fordham Institute for the origins of this silliness. Diane, could you enlighten us to the origins of this ‘bad teachers’ theory?
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Everyone has had one. One bad teacher seems to have spoiled the bunch of us.
The problem is, any individual has had upwards of 50+ different teachers. I imagine if I had 50 different dentists or 50 different barbers that I would tend to focus on the one bad cavity filling or the one bad haircut. But would I paint the other 49 with same “bad” brush?
I have found that if you ask anyone, which of their former teachers that they would have wanted to be fired, they might name just one; maybe.
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Great point RageAgainstTheTestocracy. And today’s youth are just as likely to call for a teacher to be fired because they didn’t get the grade they wanted. They get the grade they deserve though. Most people mature and realize they were treated fairly.
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The headline question of this post is a canard. The real question is “How can teacher education be more relevant to the development of good teachers?”
I teach a very specific subject in high school. My teacher certification path was not very relevant at all. That was a long time ago, and I think that teacher education has improved considerably (from talking with newer teachers). However, I do not see how college courses taught in a college classroom without real world classroom contact can be useful. A paid apprentice program would attract better candidates.
I dreaded paying the university for 10 credit hours for the “privilege” of working in a school (student teaching). Thankfully a job opened up mid-year and I was paid to teach the semester. I doubt my students thought much of my “teaching,” but I learned a lot and I was better the next semester. I would have greatly benefited from a mentor, but that was not in the budget of Floriduh. And it is still not in the budget.
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