AACTE Accountability Statement
March 2003

As the demand for more highly qualified teachers has risen, policy makers have responded by promoting a range of alternative routes to certification. Those who emerge from such routes are often held to different standards and exempted from the expectations and assessments set for others who follow more traditional preparation routes. As a result, the country is quickly building a dual system of teacher education. One is governed by rigorous professional standards, high admission criteria, extensive supervised clinical practice, and state and national review. The other often has a single test or standard for admission and proficiency, few requirements for program completion, minimal program review, truncated classroom experience, and insufficient supervision of candidates to assess teaching readiness.

AACTE demands that all candidates for teaching meet the same standards, as set by federal law. AACTE promotes the use of a common assessment to test all prospective teachers? knowledge of content and pedagogy. The efforts to subvert the law and create an alternative class of teachers must end.

The nation?s teacher colleges and education schools prepared more than 200,000 teachers last year. More than 93% of these graduates passed state-administered teacher tests, and most took teaching positions in the nation?s K-12 schools. Despite this success, professional preparation programs are the focus of criticism from policy and practitioner communities. Criticism of teacher education centers on its perceived inability to instruct teacher candidates in ways to produce greater K-12 student learning. The policy community is demanding that teacher colleges and education schools show the ?value added? of their programs. AACTE is determined to respond to this expectation by showing that its members? graduates not only excel at today?s teacher tests but are able to make a positive difference in the learning of their students. AACTE has mounted a campaign to ensure that all preparation programs gather evidence to show the impact of their graduates on K-12 student learning.

Today, more than 625 separate tests assess the capabilities of beginning teachers. Owned by at least three major test companies, they manifest the constraints of legal demands and workplace expectations for such occupational tests. Ways must be found to strengthen those assessments while recognizing that the ultimate test of beginning teachers? capacity to teach is their impact on the learning of every student in a K-12 classroom.

Therefore,

1. AACTE calls for the rigorous assessment of all prospective teachers? knowledge of both content and pedagogy regardless of the route pursued to become a teacher.
2. AACTE commits to facilitating the creation of a national evidentiary base to show the impact of teacher education on the learning of all K-12 students.
3. AACTE calls upon the National Research Council to work with a coalition of national organizations to design a common assessment and reporting system to assess candidate proficiency on the standards and expectations set by the Interstate New Teacher Assessment and Support Consortium.
4. AACTE calls for a strengthening of the specialized accreditation process to stimulate greater attention to evidence-based accountability in all teacher preparation programs.

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