General Teacher Preparation Policy
Minimum Standards of Performance: Oklahoma does not set minimum standards of performance for the categories of data that programs must report.
Program Accountability: As a result of the lack of minimum standards of performance, Oklahoma does not articulate consequences for programs that fail to meet specific criteria. Oklahoma does delineate consequences, including revoking accreditation, for programs that do not meet standards and do not improve, although the state does not set objective, minimum performance standards. Oklahoma's Commission of Educational Quality and Accountability recently revoked the University of Tulsa teacher preparation program's state accreditation, clearly demonstrating that the state holds programs accountable.
State Report Cards: Oklahoma publishes annual reports showing the data the state has collected on individual teacher preparation programs.
Program Approval Process: Oklahoma maintains full authority over the teacher preparation program approval process. All programs must meet the Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation (CAEP) standards, but the Commission of Educational Quality and Accountability has final program approval.
Establish the minimum standards of performance for each category of data.
Oklahoma should establish precise minimum standards for teacher preparation program performance for each category of data it collects to help clarify expectations regarding program quality.
Oklahoma was helpful in providing NCTQ with the facts necessary for this analysis.
Oklahoma also added that the state's accreditation standards and process are the mechanism for setting minimum performance and consequences for not meeting the minimum level of performance. The status of the educator preparation programs' accreditation (i.e., First Accreditation, Continued Accreditation, Probationary, Revocation) is published in the Office of Educational Quality and Accountability annual report.
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]