General Teacher Preparation Policy
Student Growth Data: Florida 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 data on the performance of completers' students on statewide assessments using the student learning growth formula. Florida also collects student performance by subgroup.
Additional Program Data: Florida collects other objective, meaningful data to measure the performance of teacher preparation programs. The state requires that, for approval, programs must collect data regarding placement and retention rates of program completers. Additional data may include program completers' and employers' satisfaction. Prior to program completion, teacher candidates must also demonstrate the ability to positively affect student learning growth in the area of program concentration during the field experience.
Also, preparation programs must guarantee the high quality of its program completers during the two years following completion or initial certification, whichever comes first. Any program completer who is employed during this two year period in a Florida public school, and earns an evaluation result of developing or unsatisfactory on a district's evaluation system, must be provided additional training by the program at no additional cost to the teacher.
As a result of Florida's strong data collection policy for its teacher preparation programs, no recommendations are provided.
Florida recognized the factual accuracy of this analysis.
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]