Teacher Policy Under the Elementary and Secondary Education Act and Higher Education Act: A Convergent Trajectory With an Unclear Future

• In Event: Convergence: U.S. Education Policy 50 Years After the Elementary and Secondary Education Act and the Higher Education Act of 1965

Abstract

The teacher workforce and teacher policy in the U.S. have both changed dramatically in the five decades since the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) and Higher Education Act (HEA) were first passed in 1965. In many ways teachers were an afterthought five decades ago when the acts were first passed, yet today accountability is very much focused at the teacher level and has also moved to the university ranks where there is now a push to influence how education schools train and prepare teachers at the front-end of the teacher pipeline.
This paper explores several important elements influential to the current ESEA and HEA policy landscapes as they relate to teacher accountability. We describe the key research findings that have led to the dramatic evolution of teacher policy, highlighting the arguments for and against the recent, and controversial, impetus to focus on output measures of teacher productivity. And we discuss how this relates to the even more recently proposed teacher preparation accountability measures and convergence of ESEA and HEA.
Based on reviews of prior legislation, we show that despite notable exceptions there was little convergence before 1998 around ESEA and HEA as they related to a focus on teacher quality, and that it is a lack of legislative action (e.g. postponement of scheduled ESEA and HEA reauthorizations) that has played a powerful role in the convergence in K-12 and higher education teacher accountability. Yet while the recent convergence of higher education and K-12 teacher accountability is a recent phenomenon, it one that is likely to continue given recent empirical findings, the direction of future research, and the increasing political divide that exists in Washington around education policy issues.
The paper concludes that the institutional and political forces that determine who enters teaching are such that we are only likely to see significant changes to workforce quality as a result of the recent ESEA-type accountability measures that are changing how teachers are trained in universities and the experiences that await them on the job. However, we note that given recent polarization of the political environment federal intervention, at least in the form of teacher-school-test-based accountability, may have run its course as there is significant push back from key stakeholders (teachers and the public) who would be pivotal to implementing such policies.

Authors

• Dan Goldhaber, American Institutes for Research

• Nate Brown, University of Washington