It is hard to tell if states are doing anything about poor teacher education programs, since many are not evaluating them like they are required to do.
Even the federal government’s watchdog arm seems a bit stumped by the absence of performance information on teaching programs. At least seven states are not complying with a key federal reporting requirement for teacher colleges—and the U.S. Department of Education hasn’t forced them to, the Government Accountability Office found in a newly released report.
Based on surveys and interviews with state officials, the GAO found:
- Seven states ignored the HEA’s requirement to identify “at risk” and “low performing” teacher programs, some of them blatantly: “They believed their other oversight procedures [were] sufficient to ensure quality” without having such a process in place, the GAO said.
- Also at fault: The U.S. Department of Education did not have a monitoring process in place to ensure that states met their responsibilities under the law.
- 12 states told the GAO they could not provide information on which providers they approved, approved conditionally, or denied approval to; elsewhere, just two providers were shuttered in 2013-14.
- The Education Department also has not tried to figure out what could be done to make the federal reporting more useful for states.
- The agency has not made clear the limitations of the federal data, including inconsistencies among states in how they define terms like “program completers.”
The Education Department responded by saying it would work with the noncompliant states, and it also cited its controversial proposed regulations to strengthen Higher Education Act requirements as a sign that it is committed to improvement. Still, it stands to reason that the complex rules could make enforcement even harder. A new rule—expected in the next few months—will guide the department’s efforts to monitor whether states have strong systems in place to identify the lowest-performing programs.
To read the entire report, see http://gao.gov/products/GAO-15-598
For more, see
http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/teacherbeat/2015/07/teacher_education_data_stumps_feds.html
