General Teacher Preparation Policy
Minimum Standards of Performance: Maryland does not set meaningful minimum standards of performance for the categories of data that programs must report. The state collects programs' licensure test pass rates and requires 80 percent of program completers to pass their licensure exams. This 80 percent pass-rate standard, while common among states, sets the bar quite low and is not a meaningful measure of program performance.
Program Accountability: As a result of the lack of minimum standards of performance, Maryland does not articulate consequences for programs that fail to meet specific criteria.
State Report Cards: Maryland does not produce and publish an annual report card that shows the data the state collects on individual teacher preparation programs.
Program Approval Process: As of new legislation effective June 2017, Maryland now maintains full authority over teacher preparation program approval. The state will no longer accept the standards of a potential national accrediting agency in the future, but rather the state will require that any affiliated national accrediting agency meet the Maryland Program Approval Standards, which will be reflected in a revised Institutional Performance Criteria document. This change is the result of the fact that there is currently no United States Department of Education-recognized national accreditor. Maryland has extended a one-year grace period, where no approval visits are scheduled, to all institutions of higher education due to the recent legislation and the upcoming revision of the Institutional Performance Criteria.
Establish meaningful minimum standards of performance for each category of data.
Maryland should establish precise minimum standards for teacher preparation program performance for each category of data it collects to help clarify expectations regarding program quality. The 80 percent pass rate minimum is too low a bar to be meaningful.
Ensure that criteria for program approval result in greater accountability.
Maryland should ensure that programs are held accountable for meeting minimum standards of performance, and that the state's accountability system is sufficient to differentiate performance among programs, including alternate route programs. The state should 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, Maryland should consider finding effective ways to disseminate best practices.
Publish an annual report card on the state's website.
Maryland should produce an annual report card that clearly displays program-level data the state collects on individual teacher preparation programs. This report card should be publicly available on the state's website, at a minimum. Data should be presented in a manner that transparently conveys whether programs have met performance standards.
Maryland was helpful in providing NCTQ with the 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]