ED’s Teacher Prep Study Highlights ‘Gray Areas’ on Defining Quality

The U.S. Department of Education’s most recent report on teacher preparation and credentialing includes a slew of new information, thanks to new provisions in the 2008 reauthorization of the Higher Education Act. These include admissions requirements for all traditional and alternative teacher preparation programs, the number of student teaching hours required during preparation, details on how the state is improving teacher quality, and criteria for determining low-performing programs.

Stephen Sawchuk at Education Week does a good job of outlining some key findings here, including state report cards, which include not only admissions requirements for every traditional and alternative preparation program in the state, but also average scale scores on licensing tests. This is important, as Sawchuk points out in California, where the report card shows that the average scale score on the licensing exam is higher than the exam’s cutoff score – meaning the licensing benchmark is lower than the average test-taker.

But as much as the department’s report provides new data, it also highlights deepening undefined, gray areas.

Take, for example, the identification of low-performing programs. The report, which is intended to be released annually but was on a three-year hiatus during changes in reporting requirements, shows that less than 2 percent of the nation’s teacher preparation programs were identified as low-performing, or at-risk of being low-performing, in 2010. So what is “low-performing”? How do we measure the performance of teacher preparation programs without a shared understanding and agreement on how to measure teacher performance. And how do we trust states and institutions to be honest about low-performing programs if the definition itself isn’t even clear?

We tried to address much of this in our brief last year, which called for teacher preparation programs to be judged by specific, measurable results, including student achievement scores of students who are taught by program graduates and the employment and retention rates of each program, as well as admissions requirements and the institution’s ability to train and place teachers in high-need subject areas. But the question of what low performance means, how to define and measure it, continues to confound states and their ongoing efforts to improve teacher preparation.

Tagged as: Teacher Preparation, Teacher Preparation Programs, U.S. Department of Education