Teacher Preparation Policy
Minimum Standards of Performance: Oklahoma has established the following set minimum standards of performance for the programs that opt for state review.
Maintain full authority over the process for approving teacher preparation programs.
Oklahoma should ensure that it is the entity that directly considers all the evidence of program performance and makes the final determination of whether programs should continue to be authorized to prepare teachers. The state should make program approval decisions based on standards that apply to all programs and not rely solely on outside reviews as the basis of continuing program approval.
Oklahoma was helpful in providing NCTQ with facts that enhanced this analysis. The state indicated that program approval authority still lies with state regardless of whether the program utilizes a SPA review. All programs come before the board, which reviews the reports and makes the final determination on continuing program approval.
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]