Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation Standards and Their Implications for Diversity and Social Justice in Teacher Preparation

• In Event: 66.030 - Multiple Meanings of "Education for Social Justice": From Knowledge to Practice in an Urban District

Abstract

This conceptual paper examines the problematic assumptions of the newer CAEP accreditation criteria. It particularly analyzes how CAEP’s Standard 3 on Candidate Quality and Standard 4 on Program Impact are seriously dismissing decades of scholarship on the necessity to augment and diversify America’s teaching force, and infuse teacher education with a social justice agenda (Cochran-Smith, 2010; Darling-Hammond, 2003; Ladson-Billings, 2009; Nieto, 2000; Zeichner, 2009). This paper contends that CAEP accreditation standards and the culture of evidence that they are mandating represent the newer embodiment of neoliberalism (Brown, 2003; Davies and Bansel, 2007).
In 2013 after several years of negotiation, the National Council of Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) merged with the Teacher Education Accreditation Council (TEAC) to form the Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation (CAEP), which is the new national accrediting institution. This merging, which was funded by the Broad Foundation and other venture philanthropies, represents years of planning to produce a new organization with a new set of standards to substantially transform teacher education.
The new Standard 3 on Candidate Selection foresees that by the year 2018-2019 teacher education programs will admit only those students who will rank in the top third of the GRE, ACT or SAT tests. As happened in the past with the former NCATE’s standard 4 on Diversity, which was appropriated for marketability purposes (Weiner, 1993, 2007), the newer Standard 3 has been artfully crafted to provide the impression that CAEP is really concerned about creating a diverse teaching force. Nothing seems further from the truth when the excellence disclaimer limits the scope of the diverse candidates that can be recruited into teaching. This equation disregards the fact that test scores only provide information about test-taking skills, and overlook the cultural knowledge, skills, and dispositions that diverse teacher candidates bring to teaching. The appropriation of diversity and excellence has been part of the platform of Teach for America and other corporate educational reformers for many years, and now has been legitimatized by CAEP’s Standard 3 on Candidate selection.
The CAEP Standard 4 on Program Impact, which is the newer and more crucial of all the five standards, assumes that a good teacher preparation program is the one that trains teachers to improve the learning of their students. CAEP will assess this impact through multiple measures that include the questionable “value-added measures” supported by the Gates Foundation, among others. In addition, this Standard will evaluate “indicators of teaching effectiveness, satisfaction of employers, and satisfaction of completers.” It is clear that the demands of the market have become seminal part of the accreditation criteria. Customer satisfaction, employers’ satisfaction, product quality, and business quality control have officially become the criteria to assess not only the effectiveness of a good teacher preparation program, but an instrument to predict its long-term existence.
This paper will examine how the increasing cultural mismatches between the traditionally Caucasian teaching force (65%) and the increasing diverse local student population (54% Latinos as of 2014-2015) will be exacerbated by the CAEP standards.

Author

• Marta P. Baltodano, Loyola Marymount University