Teacher Preparation Quality: Frames and Frameworks

• In Event: Fixing Teacher Preparation: Analysis and Critique of Major Reform Initiatives

Abstract

Educational Significance and Objectives
In the U.S., a new “education policy paradigm” emerged with the publication of A Nation at Risk (Mehta, 2013). This paradigm singled out teacher quality as both the major problem and best solution to improving the nation’s education system and thus enhancing its economic health (Cohen, 1995). Paper 1 presents the concept of “teacher preparation quality” as a sub-set of teacher quality, based on the widespread belief that preparation providers are responsible for producing teachers who boost students’ achievement (Hess & McShane, 2014), an assumption that brought unprecedented attention to teacher preparation (Cochran-Smith & Villegas, 2014).
Data Sources and Modes of Inquiry
This session draws on the research of an interdisciplinary team that has worked for two years to chart the contemporary landscape of U.S. teacher education reform. The team has constructed an inter-connected repository of 1000+ documents regarding teacher preparation quality and/or reform. In addition to background sources, the repository includes: policy documents and tools; media artifacts; position statements and reports from reform advocates and opponents; and, scholarly critiques of teacher preparation reforms. (See Tables 1-4 for details about the 450+ repository items analyzed for this session.) To analyze key initiatives, each paper draws on frameworks from policy and social movement theory, respectively. First, the analyses use Honig’s (2006) “horizontal policy dimensions” to identify: policy goals and targets; new (and old) policy actors, implementers and targets; and, key organizations and jurisdictions. The analyses use Akiba & LeTendre’s (2009) “vertical dimensions” to identify the factors influencing teacher preparation quality at different levels, from global and transnational to national and sub-national. Second, the analyses draw on frame analysis from social movement theory (Entman, 1993; Gamson, 1988; Snow & Benford, 1988) to identify major debate and contestation as well as the arguments and rhetorical strategies advocates and opponents use to frame and connect their positions.
Analyses and Interpretations
Following Papers 2, 3, 4 and 5, Paper 1 looks across the four initiatives. Although they all target accountability, they vary in horizontal and vertical dimensions. Some were developed by newly-constituted professional organizations or new advocacy organizations, while others reflect expansions or reinventions of the powers of long-time policy actors. Further, all the initiatives have connections to global education reform, but they feature different permutations of federal, state and institutional mandate and enforcement. The four initiatives frame the problem of teacher preparation quality differently—from lack of sophisticated data systems, to lack of transparency in the marketplace of consumers, to lack of uniform professional standards. Accordingly, the initiatives work from different theories of action about which mechanisms actually have the capacity to boost teacher quality, and they are contested on diverse grounds by those both internal and external to the teacher education community. Finally although all four initiatives aim generally to promote equity, our analysis shows that most operate from a narrow sense of “equity as equal or same access” to teachers without addressing the larger historical systems of inequality that produce educational inequity in the first place.

Author

• Marilyn Cochran-Smith, Boston College