Teacher Preparation Policy
Student Growth Data: The District of Columbia does not collect or publicly report data that connect student growth to teacher preparation programs.
Licensure Exam Pass Rates: The District of Columbia does not collect and publish meaningful pass rate data that inform a reasonable
judgment of the performance of each approved teacher preparation
program, including first-time or final pass rate data for all test takers at the
program or institutional level.
Collect data that connect student growth to teacher preparation programs, when those programs are large enough for the data to be meaningful and reliable.
The District of Columbia should consider collecting the academic achievement gains of students taught by programs' graduates, averaged over the first three years of teaching, when the programs produce enough graduates for those data to be meaningful and reliable. Data that are aggregated at the institution level (e.g., combining elementary and secondary programs), rather than disaggregated by the specific preparation program, have less utility for accountability and continuous improvement purposes than more specific data because institution-level data aggregation can mask significant differences in performance among programs.
Publish first-time and final pass rate data at the program level for all test takers.
The District of Columbia 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.
The District of Columbia was helpful in providing NCTQ with facts that enhanced this analysis. The District also noted that during the 2020-21 school year and in subsequent school years, OSSE intends to provide an annual report to each DC-approved educator preparation provider (EPP), which will include local education agency (LEA) and EPP data, such as: teacher candidate certification information and demographics; employment/placement outcomes; teacher evaluation levels (effective or not effective); licensure exam pass rates by EPP; citywide supply and demand; and teachers employed in special populations groups. School year 2020-21 EPP reports will be provided to EPPs, but will not be available to the public.
With regard to licensure exam pass rates the District of Columbia indicated that it participates in the publicly available Title II institutional program and state data collection and reporting each year. Summary (final) licensure exam pass rates by institution and state are available on the Title II website. DC has access to first-time licensure pass rates for test takers at the program, institution, and state level, from OSSE's Educator Credential Information System and/or the Educational Testing Service (ETS).
Title II data required by the U.S. Department of Education only requires the test data of program completers and does not require data for all test takers. Many programs require passage of licensure tests as a condition of program completion. Therefore, pass rates of program completers are often artificially high and mask true pass rates.
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]