Friday, March 09, 2012

Holliday Named to Teacher Preparation Commission

            Kentucky Education Commissioner Terry Holliday, Ph.D., has been named as a member of a high-profile national commission to raise standards for teacher preparation across the nation.
In order to help ensure that every classroom in the nation has an effective teacher, a national Commission on Standards and Performance Reporting will develop rigorous accreditation standards for educator preparation that will raise the bar for preparation providers, the Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation (CAEP) announced today. CAEP is the new accrediting body being formed through the unification of two organizations charged with assuring quality in educator preparation — the National Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) and the Teacher Education Accreditation Council (TEAC).
The commission will ensure increased accountability through a focus on outcome data and key program characteristic data. CAEP has pledged to use multiple measures in its evaluation system, including new sources of data from state longitudinal databases. CAEP standards will also give increased attention to recruiting and admissions to help ensure a supply of candidates who are motivated to enter the teaching workforce and have characteristics associated with teaching success and who are prepared in areas in which they are needed.
“The work of this commission complements Kentucky’s proposed Professional Growth and Effectiveness System for teachers and administrators, which also looks at multiple measures of effectiveness,” said Holliday. “It is crucial that the teacher preparation programs in our state’s higher education institutions provide teacher candidates with the means to be successful, and this commission will ensure the quality of those programs.”
CAEP will expect accredited preparation providers to take bold steps to recruit, prepare and help develop effective teachers who can contribute their expertise to improving student performance in all schools.
Through the development of the new standards and accompanying processes, CAEP’s quality assurance system will be characterized by the accreditor’s dual mission of accountability and improvement. CAEP’s decision-making will be transparent and will clearly recognize the qualities that matter in programs.
            CAEP believes that all educator preparation providers should be subject to the same high standards of quality. To make this possible, one of the tasks of the commission is to ensure accreditation standards are appropriate for all preparation providers. In the past, accreditation standards have been geared specifically to higher education institutions.
The Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation, to become operational in 2013, will accredit over 900 teacher education institutions across the nation, producing approximately 175,000 graduates annually. For more information, see CAEP Updates at www.ncate.org or http://www.ncate.org/Public/Newsroom/CAEPUpdates/tabid/788/Default.aspx. You also can visit www.caepsite.org and http://www.teac.org/news-events/caep/

SOURCE: KDE Press release

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

It amazes me how global economic and academic comparisons have served as a catalyst of comparison between the U.S. and these other contries were are so fearful of falling behind. We use these places as our justification for "reform" actions but I am at a lose to identify any of them as obsessed with similar changes in their systems. To the contrary, many of their approaches are relatively traditional in practice. No one seems to be willing to recognize that our culture is based upon individuality and personal freedom and with that comes the possibility of failure. Expectations of standardized behavior and performance run counter to the ideals and behaviors of our citizens.

Anonymous said...

I am sorry, but how many years did he serve preparing pre-service teachers for classrooms?