lessons from teacher education - debdavis /...

52 Change • July/August 2012

Frank B. Murray is the H. Rodney Sharp Professor in the School of Education and the Department of Psychology at the University of Delaware, where he served as dean of the College of Education between 1979 and 1995. He also chairs the boards of the Teacher Education Accreditation Council (TEAC) and the Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation (CAEP).

By Frank B. Murray

SIX MISCONCEPTIONSABOUT ACCREDITATION IN

HIGHER EDUCATIONLessons from Teacher Education

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The public perceptions of primary and secondary education re-flected in the 1983 Nation at Risk pre-figured those evident in the 2006 Spellings Commission report about higher education. In both, the claim was that the public and policymakers had lost con-fidence in education because it was failing to deliver on its com-

mitment to adequately prepare students for the future. The recommendations in the former report became more or less the core recommendations of the latter: Schools and colleges should (1) establish learning standards for a “no-frills” curriculum, (2) administer assessments to measure their achievement, and (3) impose sanctions if the standards were not met.

The role of accreditation is to assure that the standards that uniquely de-fine institutions and programs are adhered to so that their increasingly high costs produce solid value. The uniquely American way of creating this as-surance is through approximately 70 independent non-governmental and voluntary agencies with some or all of the following purposes: (1) consumer protection, (2) the fair and accurate public disclosure of the quality of higher education institutions and programs, and (3) the continuous improvement of those institutions and programs.

In the fall 2011 issue of The Presidency, a publication of the American Council on Education (ACE), Terry Hartle, a senior vice-president of ACE, outlined six misconceptions about accreditation that threaten a seven-decades arrangement in which accreditors have served the public by vouch-ing for the quality of institutions and programs that receive federal monies. While most of these misconceptions are rooted in differing views of the pur-poses of accreditation, they are only partly in error and need to be addressed if accreditation is to continue to provide its uniquely American form of qual-ity assurance.

Teacher education accreditation, whether by the Teacher Education Accreditation Council (TEAC) or the National Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE), often serves as the canary in the coal mine for upcoming changes in federal accreditation policy. So it provides a conve-nient lens through which to see how the looming threats to all higher educa-tion accreditation might play out.

The MisconcepTions

Misconception 1: Accreditation Does Not Protect Students from Bad Schools

This view is rooted in the fact that nearly all institutions and programs that seek accreditation satisfy their accreditors’ standards and eventually succeed in acquiring it (the very few that don’t invariably fail because they are no longer financially viable). This misconception assumes, of course, that there are large numbers of lousy schools that have earned, but should have been denied, accreditation and, presumably, been closed.

There are approximately 1400 teacher education programs. A pre-requisite for both TEAC and NCATE accreditation is state approval of the program seeking accreditation and regional accreditation for its institution. But only 2 percent of teacher education programs are described as low performing or at risk in their state Title II reports. In these circumstances it is fair to ask how many state-approved and regionally accredited institutions should be denied accreditation of their programs as a matter of good practice, and how could one know how many should fail beforehand so that some standard for denial could be set?

SIX MISCONCEPTIONSABOUT ACCREDITATION IN

HIGHER EDUCATION

www.changemag.org 53


Like most accreditors, both NCATE and TEAC do a con-siderable amount of quality screening before any site visits occur. Both accreditors find that programs need to submit suc-cessive versions of their self-study reports (called an inquiry brief by TEAC and an institutional report by NCATE) be-fore they are ready for those site visits. Their accredita-tion rates would be lower than reported if either accreditor counted those institutions and programs that find the process too difficult and simply withdraw from it before any visit.

Depending on whether the program seeking accredita-tion was fully successful in achieving the status it sought or received something less than that (a shorter term of ac-creditation, provisional accreditation, formal citations of weaknesses, etc.), TEAC’s accreditation rate varies between 28 percent for those who received precisely what they hoped for and another 70 percent for those who received something less. In the end, the 2 percent who initially failed entirely were able to make the needed improvements, so that in that sense, the overall pass rate was 100 percent. But the record also shows that TEAC was able to make clear distinctions in the quality of the programs seeking accreditation by award-ing shorter terms of accreditation to some programs and re-quiring subsequent visits focused on identified problems.

This misconception is a corollary of the now discredited, but formerly pervasive, practice of grading on the curve, which required an a priori assumption that quality is nor-mally distributed in the population. Accreditation is com-promised when a certain a priori failure rate is expected as a sign of the accreditor’s quality. The public can never be cer-tain what the true merits of the program were, just as it can never be sure what a B grade on the curve means: Its signifi-cance is wholly contingent on the proportion of students who earned other grades, which varies over time.

Misconception 2: Accreditation Is Focused on the Wrong Thing

By the wrong thing, critics generally mean that the institu-tion or program is judged by whether it has accomplished its own mission and not that of some other group with other goals and aspirations for higher education. But I would argue that no one is misled if the mission is publicly and clearly stated and the accreditor warrants that it was accomplished.

Sometimes, the wrong things are standards or require-ments that have no basis in established scholarship and are little more than the untested preferences of a profession or a discipline. This is indeed a serious problem, because the public could be misled if the accreditors insist on standards that have no convincing bearing on quality and in fact could undermine it.

For example, an accreditor could insist that a certain percentage of graduates pass a state licensure test when nei-ther the test nor the pass rate has been validated (which is the typical case). A program for high-need non-traditional students with low pass rates could be superb for those who passed the test. Indeed, if scores on a standardized test have a curvilinear relationship with competence instead of the as-sumed linear relationship, high mean scores and pass rates could also signify lower quality.

On the whole, accreditors with standards that require certain numbers of books in the library or that classes be of a certain size and that specific proportions of faculty be ten-ured, have terminal degrees, be full-time, and so forth have not been able to show that deviations from these require-ments are sound indicators of low quality. In this instance the public perception is correct: Accreditors are indeed fo-cused on the wrong things.

So TEAC makes its accreditation decisions based on whether the program has reliable and valid evidence that its graduates are competent, caring, and qualified beginning teachers and that it has functioning and credible procedures for determining that they are. NCATE similarly bases its accreditation in large part on the results of the institution’s assessments of its graduates’ performance. These are the right things upon which to base accreditation and the one thing the public and policymakers care about: whether the graduates are competent to carry out their professional as-signments.

Misconception 3: Accreditation is Not TransparentThe third misconception occurs because the public sees

only the outcome of the process—only the decision and not what supported it. It is not unlike transcripts that only show course grades and not what justified them, or published articles that do not disclose the reviewers’ comments and analysis, or political decisions that do not disclose the deals and quid pro quos that led to them.

While this is a fair point, most accreditors resist full dis-closure of the substance of their processes only because they believe that programs will be more open and forthcoming when their faults and weaknesses are not made public. This issue may come down to a so-far-unanswered empirical question: Are shortcomings uncovered and more effectively remedied when they are addressed in the public arena or out-side it?

TEAC addresses the transparency issue by way of a sum-mary that sets out the program’s claims of its graduates’

Accreditation is compromised

when a certain a failure

rate is expected as a sign of

the accreditor’s quality.


competence, the evidence for such claims, and other matters. This summary is displayed on TEAC’s website (www.teac.org), along with the program’s accreditation status and the term of the accreditation. Thus, the public sees the details of the program’s case for accreditation.

To prevent any misrepresentation, the program is asked to pronounce that the auditors’ summary of the case is ac-ceptably accurate. And program representatives are entitled to attend the meeting of the panel that evaluates the case for accreditation and recommends the program’s accreditation status. They see the entire discussion and are permitted to point out any errors of fact before the panelists vote.

By January 2013, TEAC and NCATE will have joined together to create a new teacher education accreditation agency, the Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation (CAEP). One of its plans to increase transpar-ency is to issue an annual report card on the status and health of educator preparation in the nation, based on CAEP’s ex-tensive data on its 900 accredited programs.

Misconception 4: Accreditation Is Riddled with Conflicts of Interest

The institutions and programs seeking accreditation pay the accreditors’ costs, so it may appear that they are pur-chasing their accreditation. When an accreditor denies ac-creditation, it denies itself some income; when it accredits, it enriches itself. The appearance of a conflict of interest does not mean there is wrong-doing or an inaccurate assessment of the program’s quality, but most agree that the appearance undermines confidence that accreditation decisions are al-ways objective.

Some critics also think that having faculty members serve on accreditation panels, commissions, and committees intro-duces other kinds of conflicts. A faculty member evaluating an institution is aware, for example, that faculty of the insti-tution seeking accreditation may one day serve on the panel

evaluating the panelist’s own institution, and members of the same profession or discipline may feel a bond that compro-mises their objectivity.

NCATE has sought to minimize the appearance of an insti-tutional conflict of interest by deriving substantial portions of its operating budget from 33 professional organizations and foundations that have a vested interest in accreditation. Along the same lines, only half TEAC’s operating budget comes from member’s dues and fees; the balance is from gifts, in-kind support, and grants. A Canadian teacher education ac-creditor is supported entirely by fees paid by members of the province’s teacher’s union. There are no simple solutions to this problem, though, since the parties that fund teacher edu-cation accreditation may have expectations that potentially compromise accreditation or cause the accreditor to consider factors that reduce the accuracy of the evaluation.

TEAC addresses the concern about the faculty’s possible conflict of interest by using its own professional staff to lead site visits and draft reports for the panels and committees. NCATE appoints some non-collegiate representatives from its 33 supporting professional associations to its evaluative and decision-making bodies.

Misconception 5: Accreditation Reviews Are Too Infrequent

Institutions exist in volatile environments in which online courses and programs, for-profit institutions, unusual market competition, tuition dependence, and other evolving circum-stances may lead them to make frequent and rapid changes in their character and programs.

But accreditors actually make three decisions when they accredit a program: (1) that the program meets the stan-dards now, (2) how long into the future the standards will be met, and (3) what problems need to be addressed before the next full review. Accreditors such as TEAC and NCATE address the second and third decisions through mandated annual reports and reviews. NCATE requires its accredited institutions to annually update information through the Professional Education Data Systems (PEDS), while TEAC also requires an annual update of the evidence used to war-rant accreditation in the first place.

Misconception 6: Accreditation Is Not Always Fair to Institutions and Programs

If any one of the previous five misconceptions were true, it could mean that the accreditation agency was not fair in-sofar as its decision was based on factors that had little to do with quality. Of course, a poorly managed accreditor might give inconsistent and invalid assessments in violation of its own policies, and this cannot be tolerated. And indeed, ac-creditors recognized by the Council of Higher Education Accreditation (CHEA) and the United State Department of Education (USDE) are required to show that they administer their accreditation process in fair and consistent ways

Most accreditors resist full

disclosure of the substance of

their processes only because they

believe that programs will be more

open and forthcoming when their

faults and weaknesses are not

made public.

This misconception, however, is deeper than the accredi-tor’s incompetence in conducting its own business. The more fundamental issue is that the outcomes of public education remain contested. Are schools funded, for example, to yield law-abiding citizens who can contribute to the nation’s econ-omy and security, to perpetuate a culture of common values from the past, or to rectify the injustices of the past and set the nation on a better path?

The point here is that what makes a high-quality teacher education program, and what would be fair to the accredita-tion of one, depends to a large extent on settling some unset-tled matters. These include whether competent teachers are those who accept and achieve the state’s standards for their pupils, challenge those standards, conform to school-district teaching practices or insist instead on more modern teaching strategies, want to bring about social justice, sort students, maximize student potential, or ensure that their students pass standardized tests.

The ouTcoMes

Three things are likely to happen if these misconceptions take root in the policy community and continue to under-mine confidence in accreditation.

Outcome 1: Government Increasingly Micro-Manages Accreditation

The dangers of this outcome are apparent in the experi-ence of teacher education. Congress, in an attempt to hold education schools accountable for their programs and hav-ing minimal confidence in teacher education accreditation, required that those programs whose institutions receive any federal funds disclose the pass rates on the state licensure tests for their graduates.

This seemingly reasonable and feasible requirement proved problematic to the point of undermining its own in-tention entirely.

One problem that plagued the reporting from the begin-ning was that states use different license tests and set differ-ent passing scores even when they use the same test. Is a 50 percent pass rate on one test equivalent to the same rate on another? Is a pass rate of 40 percent in a state with a high cut score better or worse than an 80 percent pass rate in one with a lower standard?

And what pass rate should be reported when a program’s graduates go on to teach in several states, each with its own test and cut score? The solution eventually adopted is to report on only those graduates who teach within the state in which the program is given. But this solution gives a mis-leading picture of the program’s graduates, because it omits many of the graduates in programs that draw students from several states. These out-of-state students are often superior to in-state ones because admission standards are typically higher for them.

The result is that we are not sure what the pass rate is for all the graduates of such programs, the very thing needed for the kind accountability envisioned by Congress. As one ex-ample, the University of Central Florida, to be in compliance with Title II, was permitted in 2010 to report results on only 13 percent of its teacher education graduates.

A second problem arose in the case of those few candi-dates who successfully complete all but the student-teaching (or clinical) requirements of the program. Usually these students graduate because they have met their universities’ standards for an academic degree. But since they did not succeed in the student-teaching course, they are (fortunately) not recommended by the education school for a license and thus cannot teach in the state’s public schools.

The regulation, though, required that all graduates, includ-ing those the faculty determined should not be teachers, be counted. This further misrepresents the characteristics of graduates who receive the license to teach, because it in-cludes those who are ineligible to teach. And, of course, it also includes all those who could have taught but decided to do something else.

Because the modal number of institutions that today’s col-lege students attend is approaching three, there is also the problem of which institution should be credited with the suc-cess or failure of the candidate for the license. Should it be the one that actually gave the degree, the one that gave the student-teaching course, and/or some other proportional al-location of credit?

Additionally, there are issues about which score to report. Some licensure tests have several parts that can be taken separately. What should be reported for a student who takes only one subtest and declines to take the others or who passes some and fails the others? Moreover, most states al-low the test to be re-taken until a passing score can be ob-


To conclude that an education

school is good because large

numbers of graduates pass

these tests is risky, because the

psychometric validity of the

current tests has not been

established.

tained. In those instances, what rate should be reported—the highest, the lowest, or the average?

Even if one solved all these problems, there is the larger issue of whether the pass-rate information is a credible mea-sure of the quality of an institution or program. To conclude that an education school is good because large numbers of graduates pass these tests is risky, because the psychometric validity of the current tests has not been established convinc-ingly, insofar as their associations with high or low levels of actual teaching performance have not been determined.

Nevertheless, the regulation has had the effect of making high pass rates the defining—and high-stakes—measure of the quality of teacher education and by extension one that should be adopted by accreditors. Conforming to Campbell’s law, which predicts that high-stakes assessments corrupt both the assessments and the learning that is the objective of the assessments, within a year or two some education schools achieved 100 percent pass rates by using the license test as a screening device.

Some critics saw these moves as subverting the account-ability motive of the regulation, but that is a curious concern. That students can pass the license tests before they enter a program could mean any number of things: that they are su-perior students, or the test is too easy, or the test is irrelevant, or teacher education programs don’t add much value, and so forth. But if the tests truly measure something important, of what relevance is their timing as long as future teachers pass them? By giving the test early, education schools decrease the number of ill-suited students who pursued an education degree, giving them an early signal that they should find an-other career.

Micro-management typically seeks to make complicated matters simpler than they should be made if they are to pro-duce valid outcomes. Thus, Outcome 1 has to be seen as a setback.

Outcome 2: The Historical Link Between Accreditation and Federal Funding Is Broken

This outcome would reduce the incentives many institu-tions have for pursuing accreditation, which in turn would have the likely effect of producing the first outcome: The government would still need to find some entity to vouch for the legitimacy of programs and institutions, and it would most likely have to take on the task itself.

To some extent it does so now by approving the accredi-tors according to a set of recognition standards and require-ments. It is fair to say that this recognition process suffers from all weaknesses that are alleged to be present in contem-porary accreditation.

The current link between federal programs and ac-creditation in the field of teacher education for both TEAC and NCATE has been based on the following provision in Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA): “The Secretary shall make grants under this section only to eligi-

Micro-management typically

seeks to make complicated

matters simpler than they

should be made if they are

to produce valid outcomes.


ble applicants that meet State and professionally-recognized standards for the preparation of special education and related services personnel, if the purpose of the project is to assist personnel in obtaining degrees.”

While accreditation is not mentioned specifically in the act, its interpretation allows the US Department of Education (USDoE) to recognize both accreditors of teacher education programs. But since IDEA funds still routinely go to unaccredited institutions, a break in the link would have no discernable impact on teacher education, unless one as-sumes that in order to gain federal recognition, accreditors have implemented valuable requirements and processes that they would abandon without that recognition.

The incentives for teacher education programs to pursue accreditation have their roots in state requirements that they be accredited. Only a handful of states currently rely on teacher education accreditation to determine which gradu-ates they will grant a teaching license to. But they may have unwittingly set up yet another link to federal funds, because no program in these states can exist to even ask for federal funds for teacher education unless it is accredited.

In the case of teacher education, and presumably in other areas, it is unlikely that the USDoE would give up the link between accreditation and federal funding. That link al-lows it to shape what the accreditors accredit.

Outcome 3: The Credibility and Value of Accreditation Is Reaffirmed

This, the most beneficial outcome, can be produced by addressing the misconceptions discussed above but also by accreditors’ raising their standards for the evidence they ac-cept that a program’s graduates are competent.

Here teacher education accreditation supplies a ready example of how the bar has been rising for that evidence. At one time, proof that future teachers were competent to teach consisted of the syllabus for the required student-teaching course. At best, the syllabus is evidence of the program’s intention; it may not reflect what was actually taught and ex-perienced by the students, and it tells the accreditor and the

n Hartle, T. (2011, Fall). Eye on Washington. In The presidency (pp. 10–11). Washington, DC: American Council on Education.

Resources

state almost nothing about the effectiveness of the student teacher’s teaching.

Subsequently, accreditors expected information about actual teaching performance, which usually took the form of the ratings that cooperating teachers and faculty supervisors gave student teachers. This was taken as more persuasive evidence of teaching competence, although these ratings were invariably inflated and less than convincing on that ac-count.

The field is now at a point where the evidence of teaching competence consists largely of the effects of that teaching on pupils’ learning. Both TEAC and NCATE now expect to see that the graduate’s own students learn something, a surer sign that true teaching has taken place than the syllabus or ratings.

Evidence that a program’s graduates are over represented among the teachers who produce high learning gains and under represented among those who produce low gains—evidence that can withstand scrutiny and otherwise meet the tests and standards of scholarly rigor—trumps any other in-formation as an adequate basis for accreditation.

Current accreditation practices in teacher education have evolved to the point that programs can be asked to provide this kind of information, which in time all accreditors will be asking for. This would be an effective way to reaffirm the credibility and value of accreditation.

The charges historically leveled against teacher education are now leveled at all of higher education. In the public’s view, students fail to receive the individual attention and guidance to which they and their tuition-paying parents thought they were entitled, and they have not learned what their grades seem to indicate they have.


Legislators see fewer and fewer services to the state and community for each year’s tax-dollar subsidy. Governors see universities that are focused solely on a narrow research agenda that is unresponsive to the needs of the wider com-munity. Alumni see standards for academic degrees and hon-ors that have slipped to embarrassingly low levels.

Accredited institutions, in short, are seen as excessively costly and self serving while failing to meet their obligations and promises. In the view of higher education’s severest crit-ics, the college degree has merely replaced the high school diploma of the 1950s in function and quality. And accredita-tion, as currently implemented, has not significantly altered these critics’ view of the erosion of standards in higher edu-cation.

The reputations of all civic institutions that have tradition-ally been trusted have suffered in recent years, and the other learned professions are beginning to receive the kind of sec-ond-guessing treatment that has been until recently reserved for teachers. Physicians are increasingly seeing their pro-fessional judgments, warranted by their academic degrees, subordinated to decisions made by health managers, while judges are finding their professional judgments supplanted by legislatively imposed mandatory sentences that nullify their professional training and experience.

Thus we can expect to find pressures on the accredita-tion mechanisms in other professions similar to those found in teacher education. Accreditors of the other professional schools will be called upon to provide solid evidence that their members are fully competent and qualified if they are to extricate themselves from intrusive and misplaced over-sight by other bodies. C

At best, the syllabus is evidence

of the program’s intention;

it may not reflect what was

actually taught and experienced

by the students, and it tells the

accreditor and the state almost

nothing about the effectiveness

of the student teacher’s teaching.

We can expect to find pressures

on the accreditation mechanisms

in other professions similar to

those found in teacher education.

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