The National Academy of Education recently released its report, “Evaluation of Teacher Preparation Programs: Purposes, Methods, and Policy Opinions”.
The report begins by suggesting that there is consensus on the importance of teachers for students but also admits that there is far from a consensus on how exactly teachers become “good” educators. There is a natural assumption, however, that teacher preparation programs play a significant role in this process, and the report attempts to provide support for this idea. Overall, “the principal purposes of this report are therefore more modest: to clarify complexities inherent in teacher preparation evaluation and to propose a decision framework for the design of improved evaluations in the future.”
The report is especially timely first because there is such a multiplicity of teaching preparation programs (TPPs) and secondly because there has been a recent proliferation of methods of evaluating teachers. In this complex environment, there is a great need for clarity.
Following are three underlying factors that the authors believe govern American education reform:
• The historical and ongoing struggle for equity and excellence in the public education system (Cremin, 1990).
• The fragmented and decentralized nature of schooling, which makes it adaptable to change (Goldin and Katz, 2008) but not easily amenable to the design of common standards for content and performance (e.g., Zehr, 2009).
• The continuing emphasis on outcomes of education (e.g., student achievement), rather than inputs to education (e.g., per pupil expenditures) as the core elements of accountability (Fuhrman and Elmore, 2004).
The main questions that the report addresses are as follows:
• How are federal, state, and local agencies and other organizations reacting to the public demand for evidence of the quality of teacher preparation?
• How are institutions that prepare future teachers—universities, teacher colleges, private non-university organizations, and others—handling the challenges of providing better information about the quality of their programs?
• What is known about the relative effectiveness of different approaches to evaluating TPPs?
• How well do different existing or potential methods align with the multiple intended uses of evaluation results?
• What are the most important principles and considerations to guide the design and implementation of new evaluation systems?
The authors find seven core principles to be useful in guiding work related to evaluation of teacher preparation programs:
- Although program evaluation is important, it is not sufficient in itself to bring about improvements in teacher preparation, teaching quality, and student learning.
- Because authority for education in the United States is, by design, diffused, the evaluation of TPPs will always include multiple systems operated by different groups with different purposes and interests.
- Validity should be the principal criterion for assessing the quality of program evaluation measures and systems.
- We assume that any measure—or, for that matter, any TPP evaluation system that uses multiple measures—has limitations that should be weighed against potential benefits.
- We assume that differential effects of TPP evaluation systems—for diverse populations of prospective teachers and the communities in which they may work—matter, and should be incorporated as a component of validity analysis and as a design criterion.
- TPP evaluation systems should themselves be held accountable.
- TPP evaluation systems should be adaptable to changing educational standards, curricula, assessment, and modes of instruction.
For a link the full report, please visit: http://www.naeducation.org/xpedio/groups/naedsite/documents/webpage/naed_085581.pdf
