General Teacher Preparation Policy
Minimum Standards of Performance: North Carolina sets meaningful minimum standards of performance for many categories of data that programs must report. Commendably, one data point necessary for program approval requires programs to provide evidence that during the two preceding consecutive years, 95 percent of graduates employed by public schools have earned a continuing license.
Program Accountability: North Carolina articulates clear consequences for programs that fail to meet specific criteria. The State Board of Education reviews the status of each program annually and gives a designation of warned or probation based on clearly defined performance standards. As a result, the State Board may impose sanctions and mandate other, specifically listed requirements. Program approval is revoked if it has been assigned probation status for three consecutive years, or if it has been on probation status for one year and the State Board determines that it is necessary to revoke approval. A revocation is effective for at least two years before the program can seek initial authorization.
State Report Cards: North Carolina publishes annual report cards showing the data the state has collected on individual teacher preparation programs.
Program Approval Process: North Carolina maintains full authority over teacher preparation program approval. North Carolina requires that all public preparation programs obtain national accreditation, but the state also requires programs to meet additional state program and performance standards in order to receive approval.
As a result of North Carolina's strong policies on reporting teacher preparation accountability data and holding preparation programs to meaningful standards based on data, no recommendations are provided.
North Carolina was helpful in providing 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]