General Teacher Preparation Policy
Student Growth Data: Indiana requires educator preparation programs to report the impact of their program on student learning by reporting the percentage of teachers who are rated highly effective or effective under the state's evaluation system, which includes student growth.
Additional Program Data: Indiana collects other objective, meaningful data to measure the performance of traditional teacher preparation programs. The state requires programs to report at least test-score data for each teacher preparation entity on content and pedagogy tests, the average number of times each program completer takes a licensing test before receiving a passing score, and the percentage of teacher candidates who receive a passing score on the first attempt. Programs must also report the attrition, retention, and completion rates of candidates for the previous three years; principal survey results; and candidate selection data.
As a result of Indiana's strong data collection policy for its teacher preparation programs, no recommendations are provided.
Indiana 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]