General Teacher Preparation Policy
Student Growth Data: Texas law requires that the Texas Education Agency will collect "to the extent practicable, as valid data become available and performance standards are developed, the improvement in student achievement of students taught by beginning teachers." The state will collect the average improvement of student achievement for graduates of an institution. This data was not included in the 2015-2016 Accountability System for Educator Preparation Annual Reports, as this system is still under development.
Additional Program Data: Texas collects other objective, meaningful data to measure the performance of teacher preparation programs. The Texas Education Agency annually collects program metrics, including pass rates on licensure exams, employment data, retention data, principal survey data, completer survey data, and teacher candidate survey data.
Collect data that connect student growth to teacher preparation programs, when those programs are large enough for the data to be meaningful and reliable.
Texas is making strides toward 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. Texas should continue to develop this system and should ensure that data can be reported at the program level, rather than at the level of the institution. 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.
Texas was helpful in providing NCTQ with facts that enhanced this analysis.
The state also indicated that programs are required to continuously evaluate the design and delivery of the educator preparation program components based on performance data, scientifically based research practices, and the results of internal and external feedback and assessments.
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]