Teacher Preparation Policy
Student Growth Data: Colorado requires educator preparation programs to collect and report data on the performance and effectiveness of program graduates, on a variety of teacher quality measures including measures of student learning. The state provides this information on its Educator Preparation Program Report Dashboard.
Licensure Exam Pass Rates: Colorado does not require preparation programs to provide or publish first-time or final pass rates of all test takers on content assessments at either the institutional or program level. However, the state does publish final pass rate data of program completers by institution and endorsement area on the Educator Preparation Program Report Dashboard.
Publish first-time and final pass rate data at the program level for all test takers.
Colorado should publicly report first-time and final pass rate data for all test
takers at the program level. Doing so allows the state, programs,
and prospective teacher candidates to analyze the strength of programs'
ability to prepare teachers in core content areas. Prospective teacher
candidates deserve access to relevant information to determine which
programs are most likely to enable them to earn a standard teaching
license.
Colorado was helpful in providing NCTQ with facts that enhanced this analysis. The state also noted that Fall 2020 will bring a new landing page to the Educator Talent website, the Research and Impact page, which will house all of the research to educator preparation programs, educator shortages, educator effectiveness metrics, educator mobility studies, and other related information. This will facilitate easy linkages across topics related to the educator workforce and make the data easier to locate and use.
1C: Program Performance Measures
The state should examine a number of factors when measuring the performance of and approving teacher preparation programs.[1] Although the quality of both the subject-matter preparation and professional sequence is crucial, there are also additional measures that can provide the state and the public with meaningful, readily understandable indicators of how well programs are doing when it comes to preparing teachers to be successful in the classroom.[2]
States have made great strides in building data systems with the capacity to provide evidence of teacher performance.[3] These same data systems can be used to link teacher effectiveness to the teacher preparation programs from which they came. States should make such data, as well as other objective measures that go beyond licensure test pass rates, central components of their teacher preparation program approval processes, and they should establish precise standards for performance that are more useful for accountability purposes.[4]
National accrediting bodies, such as CAEP, are raising the bar, but are no substitute for states' own policy. A number of states now have somewhat more rigorous academic standards for admission by virtue of requiring that programs meet CAEP's accreditation standards. However, whether CAEP will uniformly uphold its standards (especially as they have already backtracked on the GPA requirement) and deny accreditation to programs that fall short of these admission requirements remains to be seen.[5] Clear state policy would eliminate this uncertainty and send an unequivocal message to programs about the state's expectations.[6]