Education Week - March 18, 2015 - 8

Teacher Education Group Airs Criticism of New Accreditor
Debate underscores
competing visions
By Stephen Sawchuk
An apparent fracture has opened
between two major players in the
increasingly edgy teacher education
field, with the American Association
of Colleges for Teacher Education
criticizing the national accreditor
for teacher colleges.
While underscoring that the
aacte is still committed to the success
of the Council for the Accreditation
of Educator Preparation, or
caep, the board of directors of the
teacher colleges' group contends in
a recently approved resolution that
there is a "crisis of confidence" toward
the accreditor.
"Specific concerns are related to
the accreditation standards, process
for accreditation, costs associated
with accreditation, the capacity of
caep to implement the accreditation
system, and the representativeness
of the caep governance structure,"
the resolution says.
The resolution was not originally
on the board's agenda during its
Feb. 26 meeting in Atlanta, and its
passage apparently took caep officials
by surprise. The aacte represents
some 800 members.
In response, officials at caep
acknowledged that they've sometimes
struggled to supply tools and
timely updates to program officials
trying to understand the accreditor's
updated standards for teacher
colleges. But they reiterated what
they see as the importance of staying
faithful to the new, more rigorous
expectations.
"It's a heavy lift. It's a real cultural
change to say we're going to
judge ourselves on the data we produce.
A lot of places are not finding
it easy to meet these standards,"
said Mary M. Brabeck, a New York
University professor and the chair
of caep's board of directors. "And
part of this means a change for
caep. It has to step up in terms of
the information it provides."
At its heart, the debate underscores
the two groups' different tacks
in addressing the challenges facing
the field. Under the leadership of
James G. Cibulka, caep has sought to
walk a fine line between competing
policy visions for teacher education.
One, as embodied in rules recently
proposed by the U.S. Department of
Education, emphasizes greater accountability
for programs that prepare
teachers; another, largely the
perspective of the aacte, argues that
applying too much outside pressure
could detract from program innovation
and integrity.
Caep was created from the merger
of two former accreditation organizations.
In 2013, it approved a new
set of standards that, among other
tenets, require teacher colleges
to produce evidence that they are
training candidates to be effective
in classrooms. The updated expectations
will go into effect next year.
About 900 colleges are somewhere
in the accreditation process, and
caep has signed agreements with 16
states to use its process to supplement,
or substitute for, their own
quality-review systems.
Concerns Detailed
The litany of concerns in the
aacte resolution suggests some programs
are beginning to balk at the
changes before them.
Mark R. Ginsberg, who chairs the
aacte's board of directors, said his
organization's members have found
aspects of the standards confusing
or ambiguous. They're worried about
having the cash to develop systems
for producing the caep-required
data in an era of tight higher-education
budgets. And they want to be
sure that caep's governance represents
the field's diversity.
"They are not concerns generated
out of whole cloth by the board of
directors, but from listening hard
and carefully to its constituents,"
Mr. Ginsberg said.
caep's governance structure
has been in place for nearly five
years, and it does differ from the
one used by the National Council
for Accreditation of Teacher Education,
by far the larger of caep's
two predecessors.
Certain constituencies, such as
the teachers' unions and the aacte,
were delegated spots on ncate's
governing panels. By contrast, caep
now uses a nominations process and
performs its own vetting.
As for the substance of the standards,
Mr. Ginsberg highlighted
caep's selectivity requirements as
an area that has created widespread
concern among teacher education
institutions.
The standard, which will be
ramped up over time, will require
all programs to recruit cohorts of
candidates who have posted scores
in the upper third on a nationally
normed entrance exam. Long before
the aacte resolution appeared,
teacher-educators expressed worries
that raising admissions standards
could disproportionately affect black
and Latino candidates.
Caep officials have commissioned
a study of how the step-up in selectivity
would affect the teacher-candidate
pool and pledged to consider
the results as it puts that requirement
in place.
Some teacher-educators, meanwhile,
said they've experienced frustrations
negotiating the new expectations
and noted several staffing
changes last year at the accreditor.
"Caep has been extremely disorganized
throughout the entire
process," said Michael J. Maher,
the assistant dean for professional
education at North Carolina State
University, in Raleigh, which will
be among the first institutions to
be judged under the new standards.
"They changed the format on us
while we were in the process of submitting
our report, and when you
attend their meetings, you get different
answers to questions."
Caep officials agreed that certain
elements, such as the accreditation
handbook and exemplars for
the standards, should have been
released sooner. But many of those
work products are now final and are
being disseminated, they said.
Some contributors to caep's efforts
expressed disappointment in
the aacte resolution. "I was just
very surprised by this resolution
because [the aacte] has been heavily
involved," said Terry Holliday,
the Kentucky commissioner of education
and the co-chair of the panel
that developed the caep standards.
"A critical piece is that a profession
should police itself, and I think
that's what an accreditation process
does," Mr. Holliday said. "I'm afraid
if we don't police ourselves, someone
else will do it for us, like the
Department of Education. They're
certainly trying to."
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