Teacher Preparation Policy
Student Growth Data: For all programs, New Jersey collects and reports data on the performance and effectiveness of program graduates, as measured by student growth data. The state collects the results of evaluations of program graduates broken down by the teachers' student growth percentiles or student growth objectives.
Licensure Exam Pass Rates: New Jersey state policy requires institutions to provide "candidate performance assessment scores and pass rates" and "scores and pass rates on State test(s) of subject matter knowledge and a Commissioner-approved test of basic reading, writing, and mathematics skills." However, the state's publicly accessible websites do not appear to make these data publicly available. New Jersey's Educator Preparation Provider reports publish average scores based on test scores of all program completers on content assessments, but they do not contain pass rate data.
Publish first-time and final pass rate data at the program level for all test takers.
New Jersey should publicly report first-time and final pass rate data for all test
takers at the program level. Doing so allows the state, programs,
and prospective teacher candidates to analyze the strength of programs'
ability to prepare teachers in core content areas. Prospective teacher
candidates deserve access to relevant information to determine which
programs are most likely to enable them to earn a standard teaching
license.
New Jersey 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]