The Intersection of Policy,Reform,and Teacher Education

Pressures on Teacher Education

The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) of 2001 and its efforts to define a highly qualified teacher were followed by Race to the Top (RTTT), which brought a renewed emphasis on accountability. The two large federal efforts that focused primarily on PreK-12 education serve as bookends to a series of federal and state pressures on teacher education.

There were many ways that NCLB influenced and affected teacher education, but one feature of the policy fueled an already established political debate on teacher preparation (Kaplin & Owings, 2003). NCLB attempted to define highly qualified teachers by focusing on the subject matter preparation of current and future teachers. In making the point of the importance of subject matter preparation and building a case against teacher preparation, former Secretary of Education Rod Paige asserted that teacher certification did not ensure teacher quality, and the debate regarding the role of content and pedagogy continued. Colleges and schools of education reacted by rethinking existing programs, focusing on the inclusion of stronger subject matter preparation, and testing future teachers on content knowledge. In some cases, states echoed the need to focus on subject matter preparation and supported programs outside the university that allowed new teachers to enter the classroom with degrees in their teaching field and precious little, if any, pedagogical preparation. Policies related to stronger content gave rise to alternative routes to certification and fast-track teacher preparation in higher education as well as those located in private and nonprofit settings. The scarcity of research regarding the balance between pedagogy and content left the conversation open to great debate among politicians, the public, and educators.

The Obama administration brought forward the RTTT as its answer to educational reform. Although focused primarily on PreK-12 education, RTTT identified the improvement of teacher quality as one of the most pressing educational issues. The legislation continued NCLB’s emphasis on subject matter and also added the importance of placing well-qualified teachers in high-need schools (Crowe, 2011). Although not necessarily a new perspective, RTTT’s accountability focus related to teachers and teacher education programs greatly affected the field. The teacher education components of RTTT require that students’ achievement be linked to their teachers’ teacher education programs and ultimately supports the expansion of programs that can produce teachers who raise the achievement of their students.

As if federal pressures are not enough, initiatives supported by the higher education system itself are molding and affecting teacher education policy. The unification of the two accreditation agencies, the National Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) and the Teacher Education Accreditation Council (TEAC) into the Council for the Accreditation of Educator preparation (CAEP), provides an extraordinary opportunity for the profession to respond to policy issues in a coordinated and unified manner with common evidenced-based examples of how our programs are performing. As CAEP continues to emerge, policies related to accreditation and accountability will be reframed and reflected in the way that accredited programs meet standards, collect data, and describe their programs. Candidate selectivity, success in content area learning, time spent in clinical experiences, and impact on PreK-12 students’ achievement are examples of data points that will be available from accreditation processes. Shared data points identified by the accreditation process provide the opportunity to discuss teacher education programs from a data-based stance.

Initiatives emerging from the PreK-12 contexts provide another influence on policy, reform, and teacher education. A current example of the symbiotic relationship is the growing acceptance of the PreK-12 Common Core Standards initiative. Because teachers are a critical and integral part of any curriculum development and assessment effort, early indications are that the common core will move PreK-12 and teacher education to a more integrated curricular approach affecting policy and procedures in its wake. The common core is already having a great impact on public schools in participating states, and many feel it offers extraordinary opportunity for teacher education reform. “The new standards will change the expectations for teachers’ content material, pedagogical content skills, ability to affect student learning, clinical preparation, professional development and other dimensions of teaching effectiveness both for novice and experienced teachers” (Cibulka, 2010). Even so, “aligning course content and course expectation across the array of disciplines and fields of study between PK-12 schools and higher education will be an extraordinary challenge” (Imig, Wiseman, & Imig, in press) and will require an inordinate amount of resources and attention. The interdisciplinary approach to language arts and mathematics embedded in the Common Core Curriculum standards suggests that a series of research initiatives related to subject matter teaching would be an important contribution to our knowledge base.

The current national emphasis on teacher education data collection, accountability, and evaluation directly affects policy. RTTT and other statewide movements are continually moving teacher education programs toward participation in statewide data systems and insisting that the profession find ways to measure the impact of teacher education programs on PreK-12 student learning. Often state-initiated data systems lead to teacher education “report cards” resulting in a change in the way that teacher education programs report their data or even how they select, prepare, and mentor future teachers. The struggle to find a coherent way to measure the impact of teacher education and professional development on the classroom performance of students still provides a challenge to researchers and deserves serious attention and resources from teacher education scholars.

The policy context is greatly affected by recent public dialogue, which denotes shifts in perceptions of teaching and teacher education. Nowhere else was this so well documented as when the public embraced the movie Waiting for Superman: How We Can Save America’s Public Schools produced by Davis Guggenheim (2010). The movie, which was characterized by poignant examples of worthy school students struggling to find good schools, captured the country’s attention and served as a dramatic wake-up call for teacher education. It highlighted the Teach for America program as a way to reform the preparation of teachers and make sure that the “best and brightest” were heading up our classrooms. Although the lights may have dimmed in the movie theater, the tenor of the conversations continues especially as the 2012 election rhetoric heats up. Republican and Tea Party Movement actions among others have attempted to restrict federal expenditures for public education and remove funds from several teacher education programs sponsored by federal grant programs. The effect of public conversations on teacher education is beginning to emerge in our scholarship and must be encouraged if we are to continue to be viable in today’s policy environment.

An abbreviated summary of selected pressures, federal initiatives, changing accreditation processes, reform of PreK-12 curriculum, accountability, and public dialogue on teacher preparation sets the stage for a complex and complicated context where new policies are emerging and new scholarship should be considered. New policies and expectations for teacher education are accompanied by a consistent drumbeat for reform. A closer look at two initiatives emerging from the current context provides examples of how policy can be set by outside forces and at other times by the internal forces. These two examples illustrate that no matter what the etiology of the policies, pressure continues to build for the profession to reconceptualize teacher education.

Contrasting Initiatives Affecting Policy

Two initiatives, with dramatically different origins, have the potential to greatly influence teacher education policy in the coming year. Although the two initiatives are not necessarily comparable, they are illustrative of the wide range of pressures on the profession and contrasting potential results. The National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) and the NCATE are extremely disparate groups, but both have embarked on projects and processes that have the potential to dramatically affect policy and attitudes. Each in its own way also suggests how pressures and initiatives from within the profession and from without may encourage and, in fact, mandate reform.

The NCTQ, a private independent nonprofit group, is committed to ranking the 1,400 education schools in the United States (Sawchuck, 2011). With resources provided by a wide range of donors supporting their efforts, NCTQ established several standards, designed an evaluation system, and began collecting documents, handbooks, textbooks, and other supporting documentation as evidence to be used to evaluate schools and colleges of education. Their report, which will be issued in 2012 in collaboration with U.S. News & World Report, attempts to report on the quality of teacher education and rank programs based on documentation review using the NCTQ standards and indicators.

Previous NCTQ reports on the preparation of future teachers in reading and mathematics generally present a negative view and assert that teacher education programs are deficient in many areas. The most recent report by the group, Student Teaching in the United States (Greenburg, Pomerance, & Walsh, 2011), surveyed a random sample of 134 institutions and found that, based on their standards, only 10 institutions had strong student teaching programs. American Association of Colleges of Teacher Education (AACTE) evaluated the standards and the results of the study and made a public statement that the project failed to capture the current efforts related to student teaching and internships (AACTE, 2011). Credible research related to clinical and field-based experiences providing insights into the appropriate length of time in the field and identifying the pairing of mentors and future teachers could have been used to counter the NCTQ findings. Unfortunately, teacher education scholarship does not present evidence that what occurs in the clinical settings contributes to student achievement.

Concerned about the quality and integrity of the methodology, deans of colleges and schools of education, organized across entire states, became galvanized against the pressures related to participating in the ongoing study, and, as a result, many chose not to participate in the study. Teacher educators reacted negatively to the project’s basic assumption that the data would show which colleges and schools of education should be closed. Even without teacher education support, NCTQ is continuing to gather evidence and documentation using the Freedom of Information Act and other data-gathering methods. The NCTQ initiative garnered the support of a group of governors and state superintendents as well as policy makers at all levels. Regardless of how the NCTQ projects are perceived within the field, the earlier reports received significant national and state attention and were shared with policy makers and the media. The CEO of the group is often present at important federal-level policy forums. It is entirely possible that the results of the new study will affect public attitudes and resulting policies despite the objections of teacher education institutions.

An example of an initiative from within the profession was the call by NCATE for more clinically based preparation. Nearly 2.5 years ago, the CEO of NCATE commissioned a Blue Ribbon Panel (BRP) on Clinical Preparation and Partnerships for Improved Student Learning. The purpose of the commission was to provide NCATE and the field with guidance on what changes to make in educator preparation. Ultimately, the goal of the BRP was to establish a framework that would be a key factor in redesigning educator preparation. The NCATE leadership was guided by the belief that there was a gap between how teachers are prepared and what schools need. The resulting report (NCATE, 2010) presented examples of excellent clinically based programs but posited that individual attempts were not enough and the profession needed an entire system of clinically based programs to improve teacher preparation. The basic assumption of the BRP was that teacher education programs must work in close partnership with schools and place practice at the center of preparation experiences. The report issued a call to action and provided 10 design principles that if implemented would turn “the education of teachers ‘upside-down’” (NCATE, 2010, p. 2).

Since the report came out in 2010, ten states have formed an Alliance for Clinical Teacher Preparation agreeing to implement the BRP agenda. The report called on policy makers such as federal lawmakers and the U.S. Department of Education to support the Alliance through the Elementary and Secondary Act funds, funds available through the School Improvement Grants for school turnaround efforts, and the continued funding of grants to school and university partnerships (NCATE, 2010, p. v). The report asserts that the next few years of teacher education reform and agendas directed toward the implementation of the BRP recommendations “will help shape education policy and practice for years to come” (NCATE, 2010, p. v). What is needed as policy is shaped is research that examines high-quality clinical experiences and how best to select classrooms and teachers to provide effective professional development for new teachers.

The BRP gained national attention and recently was cited in a press briefing by the current secretary of education, Arne Duncan. As Duncan presented the administration’s plan for improving teacher recruitment and preparation (U.S. Department of Education, 2011), he was quoted as saying, “He couldn’t agree more with the recommendations of that Panel which include increased selectivity, accountability, and clinically-based preparation in educator preparation.” He continued, saying that NCATE’s work set the foundation for us and helped inform the administration’s plan for improving teacher recruitment and preparation (NCATE, 2011).

Relationships are often complex and intertwined, but national initiatives such as NCTQ and NCATE’s BRP illustrate the close alliance of reform efforts, formation of policy, and teacher education. In the past, the profession has taken a reactive stance to critiques of teacher education. A proactive stance requires that we critically examine our current response and the important role that scholarship can play as calls for change echo throughout our profession. What we do and how we approach the next phase of calls for reform is important for the status and future of teacher education.

A Measured Response

National pressures and initiatives provide opportunities for teacher educators to influence policy and provide input into the future of our profession. Our major efforts should be directed at identifying and agreeing on the features of teacher preparation that we all share. Journal of Teacher Education’s upcoming theme issue, “Beyond the Teacher Certification Program Debate: From Models to Features,” will contribute to that knowledge base. It would take agreement on what is important in teacher preparation programs accompanied by scholarship and data-based evidence that teacher education programs prepare teachers who provide an effective learning environment in the classrooms where they teach. To identify what is important in our programs and to understand what our programs contribute to effective classroom instruction, we must operate from a research rich foundation that informs our efforts. Strong agreement from the field about an identified research agenda has the potential to produce a more positive policy environment. In addition to research that focuses on the nature of teacher education programs, it is important to understand how policy influences educational reform. In many ways, teacher educators are uninformed about the impact of pubic perceptions and the resulting policy implications. The topic is often one that deans of colleges of education explore, but usually faculty do not consider. The multiple etiologies of policy and reform and the sustained impact on the profession are important issues that deserve the attention of scholars. Connections between policy and public attitudes and how they affect teacher education are at the heart of much of our reform, but are not generally taken into account when considering the future of teacher education.

The ideal is that newly established policies will emerge out of research results and findings. Currently, that is not the way it happens. Policy is more likely to emerge from public perceptions, based on isolated anecdotes or support for recent educational fads or initiatives. In more cases than not, policy emerges quickly and without the benefit of research before or after mandated innovations are implemented. Policy development will be more supportive toward teacher education when we are able to study changes and the impact of these changes on the preparation of high-quality teachers and the achievement of schoolchildren. We are not able to present the needed data at this point. The current context offers a rich environment for policy-related research and the opportunity for researchers to analyze data collected at the state and national level. Such research should become an important focus of our scholarship as we measure the effectiveness of teacher education.

The teacher education profession will be continually called on to rethink curriculum and programs, and there will be significant debates about what experiences produce quality teachers. There will be constant policy-driven decisions made from within and outside the profession. The calls for linking teacher education programs to student achievement will continue. The debates about the role of content preparation and the role of pedagogy will expand. Policy and public mandates will require us to focus more attention on outcome measures to determine the viability and efficacy of the program—with new federal reporting requirements that will emphasize student growth. The public and political rhetoric will continue, and it is safe to say that during the coming years, teacher educators must be prepared to participate in the debates in an informed and reasoned manner. It will be up to us to contribute scholarly solutions to the policy questions and issues.