There have been rumblings for the last couple of years about a new “bar-exam” for teachers entering the teaching profession, which this blog has discussed here and here and here. The organization that is spearheading one of the chief candidates to fill the void of more rigorous teacher licensing tests Read more
Seven states announced ambitious efforts to make it tougher to get into teacher training programs – and tougher to get a license after graduating. Under a two-year pilot program created by the Council of Chief State School Officers, Connecticut, Georgia, Idaho, Kentucky, Louisiana, Massachusetts, and Washington will pilot the teacher Read more
The Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation (CAEP), one of the leading organizations providing accreditation for teacher education programs across the country, recently released a new set of standards that its leaders hope will “elevate the teaching profession and improve outcomes for students.” Mary Brabeck, dean of the Steinhardt Read more
Recently, the Alliance for Excellent Education hosted a webinar, which is now available online on demand, entitled, “Next-Generation Standards and Accreditation Policies for Teacher Preparation and Development. The Alliance, the Council of Chief State School Officers, and the Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation (CAEP) held a webinar on Read more
New York City, especially under Mayor Michael Bloomberg, has often tried to be a model of a progressive city, willing to take on business lobbies or entrenched bureaucracies in an effort to improve. For example, recently, New York started using data to rate restaurants, track the repair of potholes and Read more
Conor Williams of the Education Policy Program at the New America Foundation takes on those in the “teacher professionalism” camp of education reform. In an article sparked by Harvard Education Professor Jal Mehta’s new book and article, “Why American Education Fails: And How Lessons From Abroad Could Improve It”, Williams Read more
Jenny DeMonte of the Center for American Progress has penned a new report that calls for teacher-training programs to be more closely aligned with those organizations that actually hire and professionally develop the teachers that make such a crucial difference in the academics and lives of students. Everyone agrees that Read more
The National Council on Teacher Quality, a Washington-based education think-tank, recently published its long awaited Teacher Prep Review. The report, based on a four star system, judged only four programs at four stars. On the other hand, NCTQ judged 160 programs as so poor that they put them on a Read more
Even though it has been known for some time that teachers and principals play the largest role in student success, it is only recently that districts and schools have started making requisite changes to their strategic management of talent. This is the central contention of Allan Odden’s new report, Getting Read more
TNTP, a national nonprofit committed to ending the injustice of educational inequality, has released a new report that seeks to help first year teachers become better teachers. TNTP was created by teachers in 1997, so the TNTP team has a vested interested in creating cohorts of new teachers who have Read more
The Teacher Education Accreditation Council (TEAC) and the National Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) are merging into the Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation (CAEP). CAEP will become the sole body responsible for the accreditation of teacher education programs and will serve the more than 900 Read more
AFT President Randi Weingarten recently reaffirmed the AFT’s commitment to increasing the standards for teacher certification. In a follow up to our previous post, American Federation of Teachers calling for an adoption of a bar exam for aspiring teachers, following are Randi Weingarten’s recent comments on the AFT executive council’s Read more
The American Federation of Teachers, led by President Randi Weingarten, has recently published a report entitled “Raising the Bar: Aligning and Elevating Teacher Preparation and the Teaching Profession.” This report calls for a more rigorous process by which teacher candidates would be certified. The process would consist of the following Read more
No Child Left Behind (NCLB) demands that “all students have access to qualified teachers, particularly in core academic subjects” and requires that “state and local policies have introduced incentives to attract well-qualified teachers to low-performing and urban schools.” The Institute of Education Sciences/National Center for Education Statistics have recently released Read more
Earlier this month, the US Department of Education released its most recent report on teacher preparation programs and initial credentialing of new teachers across the country. The report compiles data collected from states from 2008-10, and seeks to map out things like the number of students enrolled in teacher prep Read more
The National Association for Alternative Certification (NAAC) has issued two calls: one for pilot sites, and one for reviewers. The NAAC is looking to test a new set of standards, called “Quality Indicators,” or QI, developed by NAAC, Project KNOTtT, and The Ohio State University. The QIs are designed to Read more