How HEA Reauthorization Should Influence Educator Preparation

2019 just might be the year that the Higher Education Act (HEA) gets reauthorized—and if so, what should it mean for improving the state of educator preparation?

Last reauthorized in 2008, HEA saw a flurry of activity in late 2017 and 2018 on the House side, but no clear middle ground between the two parties. There have been no comprehensive proposals on the Senate side, but just last month, Senator Lamar Alexander (chairman of the Senate education committee) laid out his priorities for HEA reauthorization and said that his goal is to have the full senate consider legislation this summer. Senator Patty Murray (ranking member of the Senate education committee) followed with her own set of priorities for HEA reauthorization and echoed a similar timeline.

Title II of HEA, which currently focuses on enhancing the quality of preparation and induction efforts for early childhood, elementary, and secondary teachers, often gets lost in HEA conversations, which (for good reason) tend to center around college affordability, access, and accountability. And some fail to see a need for HEA to include a focus on higher education and training for PreK-12 educators: in fact, the entire title was slated for elimination in the GOP-led House education committee’s PROSPER Act in 2017. But the programs authorized under Title II of HEA serve as a crucial point of connection between our higher education and preK-12 systems, providing an opportunity to create an essential feedback loop between the needs of students and schools, and the way that educators are prepared by postsecondary entities to meet those needs.

To help ensure Title II is not overlooked as HEA negotiations ramp up in both the House and Senate, New America recently released policy recommendations for how to improve it through reauthorization. These recommendations aim to strengthen Title II by promoting a stronger focus on innovation, quality, and equity through 1) grant programs to promote high-quality, evidence-based preparation and to address educator shortages, 2) increased focus on supporting the preparation of school leaders, 3) efforts to encourage greater diversity among the educator workforce, and 4) improved data collection, reporting, and accountability requirements for preparation programs. More details on these recommendations follow.

Initiatives to encourage high-potential innovations, address educator shortages, and promote a greater focus on school leaders and educator diversity within educator preparation.

While Title II has very little funding associated with it, the one piece that has been funded—the $43 million Teacher Quality Partnership (TQP) grant program—has promoted innovative models of educator preparation that are more closely connected to the needs of high-need school districts and grounded in real-world teaching experience. To date, these models have largely been teacher residencies. However, in the last ten years since HEA was reauthorized, three things have become increasingly clear:

1) the importance of real-world pre-service experience for school leaders;

2) the importance of promoting a more diverse educator workforce, with significant representation of teachers of color, particularly in schools serving students of color; and

3) other immersive, learn-on-the-job teacher preparation models, such as Grow Your Own and Registered Apprenticeships, have the potential to attract and retain a more diverse and stable workforce, particularly in early education.

Accordingly, New America recommends broadening the TQP program to embrace these goals and strategies, in addition to weaving in language on the first two goals throughout Title II.

What’s more, incentives are needed to promote the recruitment, training, and retention of teachers in shortage areas, particularly in the area of English learner education. As such, we recommend creating a new grant program focused on preparing English as a Second Language (ESL), dual immersion, and bilingual educators.

Improved data collection, reporting, and accountability requirements for educator preparation programs

In 2017, Congress overturned the U.S. Department of Education’s rules promoting more streamlined, yet meaningful data reporting and accountability for educator preparation programs focused on recent program graduates’ outcomes. The rationale provided for doing so was not about the content of the rules per se, but concerns about executive overreach. Thus, as HEA reauthorization discussions begin in earnest, we urge Congress to take responsibility for improving upon what should be (and has been) a bipartisan issue: improving the quality of information available about preparation programs’ contributions to the needs of the educator workforce, and their overall performance on key measures.

Any HEA reauthorization should substitute many of the measures currently being collected and reported as part of state and institution report cards on educator preparation with more meaningful ones focused on identifying real differences in program outcomes that align to the needs of PreK-12 schools and students. We also recommend that HEA reauthorization go one step further by requiring states to use a specific subset of the data collected to rate program performance on at least three levels. The current law requires only that states develop and employ some criteria for labeling “low-performing” programs, but many states have shrunk from fulfilling this task.

This combination of collecting and reporting more useful data along with overall performance ratings can help prospective educators, hiring districts, and state and federal policymakers make more informed decisions, and ultimately drive program changes that will improve the quality of educators teaching in and leading our PreK–12 schools.

However, Congress should include an equally clear focus on supporting the use of these data for improvement to avoid repeating the mistakes of recent education reform history (see No Child Left Behind, teacher evaluation, etc.) which naively assumed that stronger accountability would translate into better outcomes for students without pairing it with support for how to achieve the performance bars that had been set. We recommend that the federal government authorize funds to aid states in providing technical assistance to programs in identified areas for improvement, with priority for those in locations where other programs do not currently exist. (Although we recommend that states be given flexibility in deciding whether to instead use those funds to support local educational agencies and cooperating organizations in developing new, innovative teacher pipeline and preparation programs, such as GYO programs). Additionally, the entities responsible for educator preparation program approval and accreditation should analyze and use these data in their reviews of institutions, including in order to identify programs in need of improvement or action.

Finally, it has become even clearer since the last reauthorization of HEA that tweaks to educator preparation programs are not sufficient to attract, develop, and retain the educator talent needed to ensure all students can succeed. State policies that impact the educator pipeline are often incoherent at best, and contradictory at worst, leading to discontent within the profession and poorer outcomes for students. To confront these issues, we recommend that Title II of HEA also include a new competitive Educator Pipeline Innovation grant that works to ensure alignment in state educator policy from preparation program approval/reauthorization, to initial educator certification and licensure renewal, to career and professional development pathways. This grant program would help create a necessary link between the efforts to support improvements in educator quality and access in Title II of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act and those in Title II of HEA, creating synergies to strengthen the impact of each.

For the full, more detailed version of these recommendations, visit our public comments page.

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