The Importance

Improving the achievement of our elementary and secondary students is a national goal. States have been pursuing this goal by emphasizing the need for high educational standards and for student accountability systems reflecting those standards. Increasingly, however, the public is calling for higher standards and greater accountability for the teachers who work with our students. As a result, the policies and practices of the institutions of higher education that produce teachers, and the states that certify them, have come under scrutiny. States and the federal government are implementing new accountability measures and reporting requirements for states and for colleges and universities.

Institutions of higher education have started taking steps to improve and to be accountable for teacher education. But there is a need for leaders in higher education to take bolder action to ensure that America's new teachers are of the highest quality during the next decade when over two million new teachers will be hired. While state and federal accountability measures can be refined and improved over time, institutions of higher education have two choices. They can fight the new push for accountability and miss the chance to use these tools as an incentive to improve, or they can insist on playing a leadership role in finding meaningful and appropriate ways to measure the quality of teacher education.

Accountability is not just an external mandate. It can also be developed and institutionalized within the campus culture in ways consistent with a college or university's mission, and as a spur to continuous improvement. After all, if we believe in our responsibility to prepare teachers well, we must be willing to find appropriate ways to measure whether we have succeeded—and ultimately, whether our teachers are succeeding in their new classrooms.

The Issues

The following comments, intended to present a variety of viewpoints about the challenges that presidents face, helped to provoke thoughtful discussion among the Summit participants.

• Higher education institutions have traditionally judged the quality of the teachers they produce through course grades and a limited student teaching experience. Meanwhile, policymakers have shifted to a results-oriented, standards-based approach for students and, increasingly, for teachers and higher education institutions as well.
• States are becoming less satisfied that graduation from a teacher education program ensures that a new teacher is qualified to teach students well. There is a growing trend toward high-stakes testing in which teacher education program approval is based on teaching candidates' performance on standardized licensing exams.
• Many people question the validity of evaluating programs based on accreditation, degree completion, or pass rates on paper-and-pencil licensing exams. The classroom performance of teacher education graduates is a better guide to program quality.
• Accreditation judgments in general tend to be based on an examination of the institution rather than a focus on the enhancement of K-12 schools.
• Institutions of higher education and states tend not to act as partners in teacher preparation; they more often have adversarial relationships.
• Admissions standards for teacher education play an important up-front role in accountability, but they often are set too low or without consideration of the kinds of individuals we want to bring into the profession.
• Some critics are so convinced of the inadequacy of teacher education and state licensing requirements that they propose to do away with them altogether.

Tough Questions to Consider

The following were the kinds of questions that presidents were asked to consider before coming to the Summit.

• Are the standards used to judge teacher preparation programs and new teachers driven by concern about quantity or quality?
• Are the admissions and retention standards in my teacher preparation program high enough to ensure high-quality graduates?
• How does my institution know that our teaching candidates have strong content knowledge and good teaching skills?
• If teaching performance is the ultimate test of quality, how good is the clinical experience component of our program?
• Will preservice students and current K-12 teachers and administrators agree with the program assessment judgments of my teacher preparation faculty and administrators?
• What role can my institution play in determining the measures of accountability on which our graduates and we will be judged?
• How does the teacher preparation program at my school stack up against the best in the country on the measures included in the report card mandated by Title II of the Higher Education Act?

Next Steps

These are complex issues central to the current debate over student achievement in the United States and the future of higher education. In discussing what can be done to address them, the presidents and chancellors at the Summit generated the following action steps. They are examples of steps that presidents have taken, or steps that presidents could take, to demonstrate their commitment to strengthening accountability on their campuses.

• Become actively involved in state teacher certification issues and in state or national efforts to strengthen accountability for teacher preparation program results.
• Examine the extent to which teacher licensure pass rates for a teacher preparation program are real measures of quality, or artifacts of a weak test and low cut scores, as part of the implementation of a program improvement strategy.
• Convene a campus group of key faculty and administrators to set program quality goals and to develop good indicators that could be used to decide how well the institution measures up.
• Develop program goals and implementation strategies with a campus-wide group that includes K-12 teachers and administrators as full members.
• Guarantee the performance of new teachers to the school districts that hire them, with two conditions: the teachers must be teaching in the fields and at grade levels in which they prepared to teach.
• Set standards for the institution's graduates that are higher than the state standards for entering the teaching profession.
• Adopt a formal admissions process that includes an assessment of whether candidates have the basic skills needed to succeed in the program.
• Get serious about how the institution's products (teachers) are affected by what the institution does. Higher education is the only "industry" that does not know anything about the quality of its product.
• Ensure a process for evaluating student learning and individualized instruction, which can take place even in large universities. Insist on accountability throughout the entire process of teacher education. Develop something like the Ford process for building in accountability at each stage of the process.
• Adopt an accountability system for the institution and for its students, whereby an institution-wide commitment to teaching a specific set of knowledge and skills is established and candidates are assessed at regular intervals to measure their progress—and that of the program—in relation to those skills.
• In partnership with the school districts and the state, agree on key elements of teacher quality and find ways to judge the institution?s program in terms of its ability to develop these attributes in prospective teachers. Institutions need to confirm to policymakers and the public that these qualities have in fact been exhibited at levels to justify the receipt of a state license.
• Work within and outside the institution to reach consensus about what the "end" of accountability is while allowing institutions to use different means in order to get there.
• Use multiple measures of performance that could include portfolios. The bottom line is: "Do our teachers have a positive impact on the learning performance of their students?"
• Shift the focus to exit standards instead of tests. What do the students know, and what are they able to do?
• Discuss the evaluation of the teacher education programs at school convocations and trustee meetings.
• Work in a group with other presidents to address accountability, including how well teachers teach in the K-12 schools and how well professors teach in the colleges of education and arts and sciences.
• Encourage faculty and academic administrators to develop ways of providing measurable results that demonstrate the impact on student learning of their various initiatives and programs.
• Use standardized tests for leverage, not as the only measure of accountability.
• Establish high expectations for deans of education and address how they are prepared.
• Form support systems with other presidents who are willing to take a stand for teacher education.
• Use the university's experts in assessment and evaluation to inform other faculty members in education and the arts and sciences.
• Promote teacher education, make it a university-wide enterprise, and make national accreditation mandatory.
• Increase the use of standardized testing as a barometer on the success of a program.
• Since institutions inevitably are going to be held accountable, embrace accountability and gain control of it.