Edward Crowe
Center for American Progress
July 2010
One of Secretary Duncan's primary concerns with teacher preparation when he went on the offensive last fall was that here was simply no quality control. Not only do these programs know next to nothing about their graduates, but ones that produce sub-par teachers see no consequences for doing so. In this paper, Edward Crowe lays out the myriad problems afflicting teacher licensure laws and how preparation programs are regulated by states (mostly) and the federal government (less so). For example, every state has their own set of licensure rules, which are informed by some subset of nearly 1,100 licensure tests of various quality and content. This mishmash basically means that district personnel offices must guess about the rigor of candidates' preparation, and preparation programs get mixed signals from states about what is expected of their graduates. Crowe's accountability system would start with a teacher-effectiveness measure (based primarily on how much students are actually learning), which would be the centerpiece of a system tying that measure to the alma mater of the students' instructor. Then, teachers and school leaders would complete feedback surveys about individual programs, the results of which, alongside teacher persistence rates and effectiveness numbers, would be publicly published for every preparation program. And finally, licensure tests would be streamlined and test cut scores and pass rate policies (i.e., how many students must pass for a program to stay open) uniformed. We've established that teacher quality is the number one determinant to student success, yet only three states (Florida, Louisiana, and Texas) use student-achievement data in teacher prep program evaluations. (Those numbers should rise as some stronger Race to the Top proposals are funded.) This paper offers one way of doing so. Read it here.
