Time to Improve Federal and State Educator Preparation Policies

The nation’s—in fact, the world’s—expectations for what PreK-12 students should know and are able to do are rising, and with this comes increased expectations for educators’ skills and abilities as well. Despite this, many of the programs that prepare teachers and school principals have not responded to the needs of the future educators they train or the PreK-12 schools that will employ them. As highlighted in Laura Bornfreund’s and my new brief, Time to Improve: How Federal Policy Can Promote Better Prepared Teachers and School Leaders, much of the responsibility for these issues rests with the educator preparation programs themselves, but states and the federal government have each played a role as well.

For example, most states set a low bar for the content and pedagogical knowledge that prospective teachers must demonstrate to pass initial licensure tests. As a result, nearly all prospective teachers who take the tests pass. Meanwhile, through Title II of the 2008 reauthorization of the Higher Education Act (HEA), the federal government has required programs and states to annually report on a substantial number of data measures in order to learn about the overall landscape of teacher preparation and to ensure that low-performing programs are identified and driven to improve. Unfortunately, this policy has failed to provide useful information about program performance to prospective students, hiring school districts, or policymakers, and has yielded no real improvements to educator preparation because:

1) The required metrics only include “inputs” to educator preparation (such as whether or not programs require a minimum GPA for entry, without asking what that GPA requirement is); and

2) States have chosen to identify low-performing programs based on measures that fail to provide real insight into quality (such as the percent of graduates passing the state licensure tests…yes, the same tests that nearly every teacher passes).

With the development of increasingly sophisticated longitudinal data systems that enable states to collect information on program graduates’ in-service performance and employment outcomes, several  states have begun reporting and using such data to assess program performance and encourage programs to improve, such as Louisiana. At the same time, many stakeholders—from state heads of education to preparation program accreditors to teachers’ unions—have called for a renewed focus on ensuring that newly minted educators are well prepared for the difficult, but important jobs they will take on. Time to Improve outlines New America’s recommendations for how a reauthorized HEA Title II can and should:

• Ensure reporting of educator preparation program outcome measures—such as the percent of recent graduates who are working in full-time positions and graduates’ impact on student learning—that can provide valuable insights to the preparation field and those it serves.
• Hold programs accountable for their performance, with rewards for the highest-performing programs and real consequences for the lowest-performing ones.

However, we recommend that these systems be phased in slowly. This way, states can ensure data collection systems are accurate and can learn from the new data collected before designing and using accountability systems based on these data. Our recommended timeline would also provide programs ample opportunity to improve weaker areas:

Finally, with the recognition that many states’ policies promote—or at least tolerate—problems with educator preparation (e.g., by not considering program graduate outcomes as part of their program approval and reauthorization process), we recommend that the federal government provide financial incentives for states to comprehensively revisit these policies. As previously proposed by the Education Trust, we support a federal grant competition that encourages states to embrace innovative policies to raise the quality of educator preparation, as well as other aspects of the educator career pipeline.

Over the past 20 years, the proportion of teachers in the classroom with only a year or two of experience has increased dramatically. While there are multiple reasons—and hence multiple solutions—for this recent trend, it only underscores the importance of ensuring that we give prospective teachers and school principals the best foundation possible to help them, and the students they serve, succeed.

Members of Congress seem to agree. In the past month, both the House and Senate Committees responsible for education policy held hearings on the issue of improving educator preparation. During these hearings, there appeared to be rare, bipartisan support for revisiting HEA Title II to replace current data measures—which have proven to be unhelpful at best, and burdensome at worst—with more valuable, relevant ones that can drive improvement in educator preparation.

Read the brief with our full recommendations for doing just that:

Time to Improve: How Federal Policy Can Promote Better Prepared Teachers and School Leaders.