General Teacher Preparation Policy
Student Growth Data: Although Nevada has not done so in recent years, state law requires annual reporting and publishing of evidence of effectiveness, in the form of teacher evaluation ratings, for traditional and alternative preparation programs. Nevada will pilot a data system during the 2017-2018 school year, to be fully implemented in the 2018-2019 school year, that includes this information. During the first year of the pilot, 20 percent of teacher ratings are based on student growth, with that percentage increasing to 40 percent for the 2018-2019 school year.
Additional Program Data: Nevada collects other objective, meaningful data to measure the performance of teacher preparation programs. The state requires programs to submit licensure pass rates and school districts to report whether program completers are dismissed or not rehired. In annual reports, programs must also include employment information about program graduates and satisfaction survey that asks program graduates and principals to give their view on the quality of a program's preparation. The state does not collect these data for its alternate route programs.
Gather other meaningful data that reflect program performance for all programs.
Nevada should consider collecting the same data for alternative programs that it does for traditional programs.
Nevada was helpful in providing NCTQ with the facts necessary for this analysis.
NCTQ looks forward to reviewing the state's progress in future editions of the Yearbook
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]