Identity Crisis

Colleges and universities, particularly those with teacher preparation programs, have been subject to harsh criticism of late. In September 2006, Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings' Commission on the Future of Higher Education issued its final report, finding that America's colleges and universities suffer from "a remarkable absence of accountability mechanisms to ensure that colleges succeed in educating students."¹ That same month, Arthur Levine, the former president of the prestigious Teachers College at Columbia University, noted that "Despite the existence of model and exemplary programs, teacher education in the U.S. is principally a mix of poor and mediocre programs."²

The combination of unaccountable colleges and low-performing teacher education programs points to a solution: a federal law requiring states to ensure that their colleges and universities do a good job preparing new teachers to succeed in the classroom. But there's one catch—such a law has already been on the books for nearly a decade. It just hasn't worked very well, because most states have chosen to create accountability systems that have never identified a single teacher education program as needing improvement.

When Congress passed the current version of the federal Higher Education Act (HEA) in 1998, it included a new requirement that states must "have in place a procedure to identify, and assist, through the provision of technical assistance, low-performing programs of teacher preparation within institutions of higher education."³ States are required to submit annually a list of the low-performing programs, as well as programs that are "at-risk" of becoming low-performing.

The problem is the law also stipulated that "Such levels of performance shall be determined solely by the state[s]." Chart 1 shows the result for the nation's over 1,200 teacher training programs.

Thirty-one states have never identified a single teacher preparation program as at-risk or low-performing under HEA. This is not because their colleges and universities are doing the best job preparing teachers to succeed in the classroom. It's because in most cases, their accountability systems deliberately circumvent the spirit of the law.

New York's accountability system appears to be close to what the authors of HEA had in mind. To obtain state certification, new teachers in New York must pass a series of tests of general professional knowledge. Teachers who teach specific academic subjects, such as high school science, must also pass tests covering academic content in their specialty. At most New York teacher preparation programs—there are over 100 statewide—the pass rate for recent graduates is 95 percent or higher. But a handful of programs—eight in 2006—reported pass rates below 80 percent on one or more tests. These were identified as low-performing.

This is a modest standard, identifying only a small number of programs where student pass rates on relatively easy tests are abnormally low.⁴ Given the pressing public need for high-quality teachers, one could argue that significantly richer and more rigorous standards would be reasonable, if not necessary. Yet the eight New York programs in 2006 represent nearly one-fourth of all the teacher preparation programs that have ever been identified by any state as low-performing under the Higher Education Act of 1998.

Most of the other states that have identified any at-risk or low-performing programs under HEA have criteria similar to New York's, using the pass rate on the state's teacher licensure test, and usually setting the standard at or near 80 percent.

The states that have never identified an at-risk or low-performing program have, in most cases, very different accountability systems. Many, like California, responded to the new federal requirement by simply pointing to processes that were already in place to periodically review and accredit teacher preparation programs. Most of these systems never identify any program as low-performing. A pass-rate requirement in California would be difficult to implement in any case, since the common state licensure test only assesses low-level basic skills. (Sample question: "At a college, approximately 2 out of 5 seniors go on to attend graduate school. If there are 750 seniors at the college, how many would be expected to attend graduate school?")⁵ And most California teacher preparation programs require students to pass the basic skills test before they enter the program, making program pass rates meaningless.

Other states have rigged the rules to make low pass rates impossible by definition. In official documents filed with the U.S. Department of Education, Oregon noted that "Oregon Administrative Rules have required passing of appropriate content tests for program completion and licensure since January 1999; therefore, all pass rates are 100 percent."⁶

As a result, if a student enrolls in a teacher preparation program at an Oregon college or university, passes all the courses, earns a diploma, but fails the state licensure test, Oregon does not consider the student to have completed his or her teacher-education program, and thus the student does not count against the program under HEA.

The lesson of the 1998 Higher Education Act appears to be that if states are given carte blanche to design higher education accountability systems, many—if not most—will respond by creating systems that provide little or no meaningful accountability.

There are some exceptions. In addition to having a legitimate pass-rate standard, Louisiana has recently embarked on a groundbreaking effort to assess programs using information about how well program graduates perform in the classroom. By using "value-added" measures of year-to-year growth in student scores on standardized tests, Louisiana soon will be basing program accountability on the success of program graduates in helping their students meet state achievement standards.

A preliminary study of the new system found that "45–50 percent of Louisiana's teacher preparation programs are preparing new teachers whose contribution to their students' achievement is comparable to the effectiveness of experienced teachers in mathematics, English/language arts, and/or science."⁷

This suggests that—unlike most state systems—Louisiana's accountability system soon will be identifying real differences among teacher preparation programs, based on evidence of student learning. Louisiana also holds entire colleges and universities accountable, not just schools of education, reflecting the fact that teachers usually take most of their college courses outside of their preparation program.

As Congress considers reauthorizing the Higher Education Act, it may want to consider the example of states like Louisiana and require more states to take a similar approach.

Endnotes
^1. U.S. Department of Education, A Test of Leadership: Charting the Future of U.S. Higher Education, 2006.
^2. Arthur Levine, Educating School Teachers (Washington, D.C.: The Education Schools Project, 2006).
^3. Higher Education Act Title II, sec. 208(a).
^4. Ruth Mitchell and Patte Barth, Not Good Enough: A Content Analysis of Teacher Licensing Examinations (Washington, D.C.: The Education Trust, 1999).
^5. Elementary teachers in California also have to pass the Reading Instruction Competence Assessment (RICA). The median program pass rate on the RICA is 99 percent, and no program has a pass rate below 93 percent. Some California teachers also take California Subject Examinations for Teachers (CSET). Sample question source: California Basic Educational Skills Test (CBEST) practice test,http://www.cbest.nesinc.com/CA_viewPT_opener.asp.
^6. Higher Education Act Title II, http://www.title2.org.
^7. George H. Noell, Annual Report of: Value Added Assessment of Teacher Preparation, Department of Psychology, Louisiana State University, 2006.

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