The American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education, recently passed a resolution favoring the idea of only having one accrediting body for teacher preparation programs. And guess which one that would be!?

AACTE's resolution is a symbolic blow for the upstart accrediting body TEAC. TEAC only accredits 27 ed schools, but that list includes some heavyweights like the University of Virginia's acclaimed Curry School of Education. The resolution is likewise a boost to established accreditor NCATE, which has been having a bad run of things lately, and which already accredits 620 schools of education (roughly half of the country's programs).

Many see the existence of a single accrediting body for all ed schools as crucial for the "professionalization" agenda--fields like law and medicine have one accreditor, so teachers should too. There's a big gulf between teaching and those professions, however. For starters, there is wide disagreement over how to even define an effective teacher and what teacher educators should do to produce them.. In fact, there's good reason to believe that much of what teacher educators would contribute to any proposed consensus is deeply flawed.

Moreover, as some of its own traditional allies have pointed out, NCATE has not done nearly enough to show that its graduates are more effective than graduates of TEAC's programs--or teachers who completed alternate routes to certification, for that matter.

Perhaps overstating the significance of the resolution, AACTE President Sharon Robinson said, "Sometimes it takes courage, but there are historical examples before us."

In other NCATE-related news, the latest issue of Education Next features a great piece that casts new light on the dispositions debate from a while back. The author, Laurie Moses Hines, places the controversy in the historical context of ed schools' long record of trying to influence and assess the personalities of future teachers.