Teacher Preparation Policy
Minimum Standards of Performance: Indiana requires programs to report specific categories of data, in three domains of admission, impact and testing data. Each domain contains a set of indicators with established minimum standards of performance. State code indicates that programs "will meet or exceed the minimum required matrix rating." Minimum requirements have been defined in order to determine whether programs have met or exceeded the standards.
Program Accountability: Indiana has established a matrix rating system for teacher preparation programs based on the performance of the programs as demonstrated by the data collected for the three most recent years.
State Report Cards: Comparative matrix data of all educator preparation providers are publicly available.The data include pass rates of individual tests and the percent of teachers from each institution rated effective or highly effective. The state does not publish institutional matrix ratings.
Program Approval Process:
Indiana maintains full authority over the teacher preparation program approval process. CAEP accreditation is one requirement as part of a larger program approval process..
Ensure that criteria for program approval result in greater accountability.
Indiana is taking steps toward holding programs accountable for meeting minimum standards of performance. While building out this accountability system, the state should ensure that the accountability system is sufficient to differentiate performance among programs, including alternate route programs. The state should also establish clear follow-up actions for programs failing to meet these standards, including remediation or loss of program approval as appropriate. For programs exceeding minimum standards, Indiana should consider finding effective ways to disseminate best practices.
Indiana was helpful in providing NCTQ with facts necessary for this analysis.
1D: Program Reporting Requirements
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]