General Teacher Preparation Policy
Student Growth Data: Illinois law states that beginning in 2018, Illinois will require educator preparation programs to collect and report data on the effectiveness of the completers of the program from the performance evaluations conducted according to state law. The state confirmed that it was unable to obtain student growth data by program in the first year of the pilot, but that this pilot will continue through spring of 2019. The new system will be fully implemented in the 2019-2020 school year, with the first reports released to the public in spring 2020.
Additional Program Data: Illinois collects other objective, meaningful data to measure the performance of teacher preparation programs. Programs must report employer and completer satisfaction survey results; the completer, graduation, licensure, and employment rate; and observation data. The state also requires programs to submit data on the pass rates for content exams and the edTPA.
Continue creating systems that connect student growth to teacher preparation programs, when those programs are large enough for the data to be meaningful and reliable.
Illinois is to be commended for making progress on linking student growth to teacher preparation programs and should work to stay on track toward full implementation in 2019-2020.
Illinois was helpful in providing NCTQ with the facts necessary for this analysis, including the information included above regarding the outcome of the first year of the pilot and the anticipated public reporting of student growth data by program in spring 2020.
NCTQ looks forward to reviewing the state's progress in future editions of the Yearbook.
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]