Proposed New Regulations for Teacher Education: Increased Federal Accountability as a Lever for Change

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

Abstract

Problem and Significance
In December of 2014, the U.S. Department of Education (USDOE) proposed an amendment to the Higher Education Act aimed to boost teacher education quality through data-driven accountability (Kumashiro, 2015). The proposed new rule calls for significant and controversial changes in the federal teacher preparation program accountability system (DeMonte, 2015; Goodwin, 2015), which has traditionally granted autonomy and flexibility in state level reporting (Floden, 2012; Plecki Elfers, & Nakamura, 2012). All U.S. states would be required to score and rank teacher preparation programs based on the following outcomes defined by the federal government: value-added measurements of the achievement of students of programs’ graduates, job placement and retention of programs’ graduates, graduates’ and principals’ surveys regarding program satisfaction, and programs’ recruitment practices.
Perspectives, Modes of Inquiry, and Data Sources
Using the concepts of policy dimensions and frame analysis (See Paper 1), this paper analyzes 74 documents and artifacts related to the proposed new federal regulations. These include: USDOE’s proposed regulation and information regarding its purposes and implementation, position statements by the policy’s advocates and detractors, media artifacts, and relevant scholarly critiques of the proposed regulation (See Table 1). Across all documents, we identified key dimensions as well as how policy actors framed the “problem” and “solution” of teacher education quality.


Interpretations and Conclusions
Our analysis yielded three findings. First, the proposed regulations are a federally-mandated but state-enforced policy that would significantly expand federal jurisdiction in state and institutional policies regarding teacher preparation. Second, the proposed policy frames the current “weak” state of teacher education as a major contributor to declining national economic security based on the assumption that teacher education should prepare teachers to produce competitive workers for the knowledge economy. Third, weak teacher education quality is framed as a problem of inefficiency and ineffectiveness based on the lack of availability and use of comprehensive data systems that identify low-performing programs. Aligned with this diagnostic frame, the proposed policy’s prognosis calls for more extensive and sophisticated data systems linking program graduate information with K-12 students’ outcomes and preparation program data. In short, the proposed DOE regulations assume the mechanism for teacher preparation quality improvement is federally-mandated state ranking and highly-publicized reporting about all preparation programs coupled with the removal of federal aid to students and the eventual closing of programs that fail to produce the prescribed outcomes.
Contributions
This paper demonstrates that the proposed USDOE regulations would affect nearly all dimensions of the current teacher quality accountability system as well as the roles of various actors in the policy system by strengthening federal control through provision of rewards and penalties. The paper also shows that despite push back from the teacher education community, the policy constructs increased levels of federal control as justified, using a persuasive narrative wherein teacher preparation inefficiency caused by a lack of outcomes-based data is portrayed as threatening the nation’s economic standing in a globally competitive market.

Authors

• Stephani Burton, Boston College

• Maria Beatriz Fernandez Cofre, Boston College