General Teacher Preparation Policy
Student Growth Data: The Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education annually collects data on the impact of educator preparation programs' completers on student learning by reporting the evaluation ratings of teachers under the state's evaluation system, which includes student growth. The state also gives providers access to the student growth percentiles of the teacher candidates they complete.
Additional Program Data:
Massachusetts collects other objective, meaningful data to measure the performance of traditional teacher preparation programs. The state requires each organization seeking approval of its preparation program to provide evidence addressing educator effectiveness, which includes the analysis and use of employment data on program completers employed in the state; retention rates; licensure test pass rates; and other available data to improve program effectiveness. The state also develops, administers, and collects the data from surveys of stakeholders, including completers and principals, on whether the program provided necessary skills for success in the classroom.
As a result of Massachusetts's strong data collection policy for its teacher preparation programs, no recommendations are provided.
Massachusetts was helpful in providing NCTQ with facts that enhanced 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]