General Teacher Preparation Policy
Student Growth Data: New York does not collect or publicly report data that connect student growth to teacher preparation programs.
Additional Program Data: Although New York collects licensure test pass rates, it does not collect first-time licensure pass rates, or other objective, meaningful data to measure the performance of teacher preparation programs.
Collect data that connect student growth to teacher preparation programs, when those programs are large enough for the data to be meaningful and reliable.
New York should consider collecting the academic achievement gains of students taught by programs' graduates, averaged over the first three years of teaching, when the programs produce enough graduates for those data to be meaningful and reliable. Data that are aggregated at the institution level (e.g., combining elementary and secondary programs), rather than disaggregated by the specific preparation program, have less utility for accountability and continuous improvement purposes than more specific data because institution-level data aggregation can mask significant differences in performance among programs.
Gather other meaningful data that reflect program performance.
Although measures of student growth are an important indicator of program effectiveness, the strongest state systems ensure that data are collected on multiple, objective program measures. New York
should maximize the information available to programs and the public by not just collecting data that demonstrate how well programs are preparing teachers for the classroom but also making such data available to the public as well.
The New York State Education Department responded that The Evaluation Systems Group of Pearson is the vendor for the New York State Teacher Certification Exams (NYSTCE), and provides a secure FTP website with data on all of the certification exams, including the number of candidates who passed and failed and the average scores. All data is accessible to the New York State Education Department, and institutions with educator preparation programs may access aggregate data on their candidates. These data are updated at the end of each scoring period (approximately once a month). The Evaluation Systems Group of Pearson also sends NYSED quarterly and annual reports and institutions annual reports that summarize the exam data. However because an external vendor provides these data to the state, the New York State Education Department was unable to provide NCTQ with a link or documentation confirming this response.
New York also provided that it has been implementing new and revised teacher certification exams since 2014 and has been closely monitoring candidate performance by exam and by institution and area to evaluate the new assessment system.
New York added that in 2014, the state abruptly established a complete overhaul of its certification requirements. As a result, there has been significant upheaval in the field as teacher preparation programs struggle to make the programmatic changes necessary to properly prepare candidates in mid-program to complete the new assessments successfully.
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]