Teacher Preparation Policy
Student Growth Data: Delaware requires educator preparation programs to collect and report data on the performance and effectiveness of program graduates, as measured by student growth data. The state collects the average impact of graduates on the growth of their students in English and/or math.
Licensure Exam Pass Rates: Delaware publishes program-specific report cards that include candidate performance metrics, including content readiness and performance assessment data. Although Delaware uses test scores of all test takers to calculate a content readiness metric for program accountability purposes, the state does not publish disaggregated data for all test takers.
Publish first-time and final pass rate data at the program level for all test takers.
Delaware 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.
Delaware recognized the factual accuracy of this analysis. Delaware indicated that while the state does not publish disaggregated data for all test takers, Title II already publishes this data annually and makes it available publicly. Delaware typically uses Title II report to respond to internal and external requests and analyses, as it includes pass rates for each assessment, program, and institution.
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]