INCREASED FOCUS ON TEACHERS & TEACHER PREPARATION

Increased Focus on Teachers & Teacher Preparation The Impact of No Child Left Behind Responding to No Child Left Behind The Call for New TQ Data Systems Next Steps: The Teaching Quality Data System Roadmap

Since the late 1980s, the nation has been focused on standards and accountability for students. Consequently, many states designed assessments and often created elaborate systems of rewards and sanctions for individual students and schools’ performance on these standards. The same scrutiny only recently has been applied to the teaching profession. Several reform groups, such as the Education Trust, are calling for teachers and teacher education to be judged by the standardized tests. Other views of teachers and teacher education offer a more comprehensive view of the profession.

Nevertheless, the accountability provisions in the 1998 reauthorization of the Higher Education Act now requires states to rank teacher preparation programs in quartiles based on state licensing test performance. States such as Texas, Georgia, and New York have followed suit, linking accreditation to pass rates on these tests. However, these tests are based on paper-and-pencil tests that have no proven predictive validity related to teaching and student performance, are insufficient to provide preparation programs with the tools they need to improve, are not well aligned to state teaching standards, and often vary wildly in their expectations of teacher knowledge and skills, as evidenced by large differences in where the cut scores have been set. The good news is that in late Fall 2005, the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE), in partnership with the Educational Testing Service (ETS), announced the development of professional benchmarks on state teacher licensing examinations. Even when NCATE and ETS complete their task, much work needs to be done to ensure that good data are used well.

At this time policymakers have few good alternatives to satisfy their understandable demands for accountability as they try to make more informed decisions. The lack of alternatives is due to the antiquated and unaligned data systems currently in place—and the lack of investment in such systems by policymakers. Consequently, despite the desires of many policymakers, the lack of quality data systems and the research capacity to use the available data precludes most preparation programs from using student achievement gains as a measure of their program’s effectiveness.

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Last updated: February 21, 2006