Teacher Preparation Policy
Minimum Standards of Performance: Washington's administrative code indicates that the Professional Educator Standards Board (PESB) "shall approve programs that maintain overall performance at or above thresholds on program performance indicators." The state has defined performance thresholds for the following indicators:
Publish an annual report card on the state's website.
Washington should produce an annual report card that clearly displays program-level data the state collects on individual teacher preparation programs.
This report card should be publicly available on the state's website, at
a minimum. Data should be presented in a manner that transparently
conveys whether programs have met performance standards.
Washington was helpful in providing NCTQ with facts necessary for this analysis.
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]