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Founded in 1997, the Teacher Education Accreditation Council (TEAC) designed a system that balances three sources of evidence in a single accreditation system: (1) that the program's graduates are qualified, competent, and caring beginning teachers; (2) that the program faculty investigates the factors that improve program quality; and (3) that the program has the capacity for continuous program improvement. TEAC's system was recognized by the Council of Higher Education Accreditation in 2001 and subsequently by the U.S. Department of Education in 2003 and 2005. TEAC accreditation signifies that the program has the capacity for quality, the knowledge of how to enhance and monitor quality, and the skill to ensure that the programs' graduates are competent. This article discusses the lessons learned by TEAC for the last ten years of service and the implications of the findings from the audit of accreditation self-studies on teacher education programs. (Contains 4 tables and 5 notes.)

Cooperating teachers (n = 684) from 40 accredited programs rated the adequacy of their student teachers' competence and some features of the institution's student-teaching program. Their ratings were at the high end of a 5-point scale (4.0+) and showed that the teachers said that both their students and the program were more than adequate and often close to excellent with regard to the student teachers' knowledge and skill. The teachers' ratings of their own understanding of the program, the training they received, and their relationship with the program faculty were significantly lower but still in the adequate range of the inadequate-to-excellent scale. Those who reported that they were better trained and had a better understanding of the program were the most satisfied with the program students' knowledge and skill and their preparation for successful teaching.

The role of accreditation is to assure that the standards that uniquely define institutions and programs are adhered to so that their increasingly high costs produce solid value. In the fall 2011 issue of "The Presidency," a publication of the American Council on Education (ACE), Terry Hartle, a senior vice-president of ACE, outlined six misconceptions about accreditation that threaten a seven-decades arrangement in which accreditors have served the public by vouching for the quality of institutions and programs that receive federal monies. While most of these misconceptions are rooted in differing views of the purposes of accreditation, they are only partly in error and need to be addressed if accreditation is to continue to provide its uniquely American form of quality assurance. This article describes the six misconceptions about accreditation in higher education. It also discusses three things that are likely to happen if these misconceptions take root in the policy community and continue to undermine confidence in accreditation. (Contains 1 resource.)

The standards that currently define a quality teacher or teacher education program derive their authority from the consensus of experts, who negotiate and craft statements that codify their views of best practice. In education, these consensus statements are rarely rooted in the field's established scholarship (as is the case for many standards in medicine and engineering) but are simply well-intentioned expert opinion and preference. When the scholarship in a field is contested and uncertain as it is in teacher education, prevailing standards are only the profession's best guess about what will make things better, each awaiting systematic scholarly investigation and verification. In this article, the author talks about evidentiary standards for consensus standards in teacher education. He stresses that vastly more important than the prose of common core, Interstate Teacher Assessment and Support Consortium, accreditation, and other consensus standards are the standards for what counts as evidence to deem that these standards are met.

Because there is more doubt than ever before about the accomplishments of today's college graduates, the public, employers, often the graduates themselves, and others seek assurance that a program's graduates are competent and qualified. There is now the expectation that accreditation will give them that assurance. Moreover, nearly everyone seeks this assurance in an accessible manner, devoid of nuance, by some clear and direct criterion and assessment. That there are no such assessments and criteria that currently meet any reasonable standard of validity is only part of the problem. In this chapter, the author discusses the tension between program accountability and program improvement in programmatic accreditation. He examines the experiences of the Teacher Education Accreditation Council (TEAC), which highlight the conflicting and sometimes incompatible expectations for accreditation. The TEAC system balances three factors in a single system: (1) valid evidence that graduates are qualified, competent, and caring teachers; (2) evidence that the program has a quality control system that works as designed and improves program quality; and (3) evidence that the program has the capacity for quality as measured by the fact that a regionally accredited institution is committed to the program. In closing, the author states that it is a fair question whether TEAC's approach itself has shed light on the quality of teacher education and whether the collective evidence from its accreditation work is in line with current investigations of the national quality of teacher education. Findings from the audit of accreditation self-studies (the TEAC Inquiry Briefs) have potentially important implications for the design and rationale of teacher education programs, but require confirmation and deeper analysis. (Contains 3 notes.)

Unlike the literature on some dispositions, like field dependence-independence, in psychology, the dispositions cited in the teacher education literature (e.g., INTASC) have almost no explanatory value and very little meaning at the present time. This conclusion stems from an analysis of the cited teacher dispositions in terms of Underwood's levels of meaning in the behavioral sciences and shows that these dispositional constructs are little more than labels for particular behaviors. Although the construct, disposition, in teacher education may be superfluous at the present time, it is not entirely useless as it may provide a guiding hypothesis for further investigations. (Contains 1 note.)

Accreditors should focus on the one task they are truly capable of performing--verifying that the claims programs make about their graduates' competence are true by evaluating whether the evidence the programs rely on for their claims satisfies a scholarly standard of evidence.

As of September 2003, there are officially two recognized accreditors for teacher education programs in the United States, each with a distinctly different approach to accreditation. The Teacher Education Accreditation Council (TEAC), the more recently developed accreditor, has been criticized for promoting "accreditation shopping," lacking standards, illegitimacy, insensitivity to diversity, and divisiveness. TEAC's position on each of these issues is explicated along with an analysis of other issues that in contrast to the foregoing, are genuine and truly distinguish the two accreditors. An exploration of the differences and similarities between TEAC and the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education suggests the ingredients of a unified accreditation system.

Argues that the legitimacy of accreditation in teacher education is rooted in political consensus, power, and scholarship. Because these roots are fragile, there is no accepted concept of educational malpractice. The legitimacy of accreditation should be rooted in scholarly evidence that the program has fulfilled the claim that its graduates are able to be competent, caring, and qualified teachers. (SM)

Attempts to implement the professional development school (PDS) are frustrated by a lack of consensus about these schools' defining characteristics. This article discusses some common criteria, emphasizes that the professional development school is not a laboratory or demonstration school, and compares the PDS to other forms of academic inquiry. Lessons from Delaware experience are also discussed. (18 references) (MLH)

This narrative considers how well equipped today's teacher education students and faculty are to meet the demands of the new Common Core State Standards. Data from the Teacher Education Accreditation Council's national evaluation of teacher education programs gives a mixed picture that, while mostly encouraging, also reveals that some future teachers, current teacher education faculty, and cooperating teachers have misguided and worrisome views of their subject matter and pedagogy.

Describes the report "Tomorrow's Teachers," prepared by the Holmes Group--an organization of 39 education deans committed to the reform of teacher education and of the teaching profession. Explains the group's plans for involving other universities in the pursuit of these goals at regional and national levels. (IW)

The standard prescriptions for reforming undergraduate education include better students, more time on basic academic subjects, more clinical experience, and more rigorous and standardized evaluation of students at all points in the program. Further scrutiny of these recommendations is presented. (MLW)

Kindergarten and first-grade children conserved physical attributes of inanimate objects more easily than the physical attributes of animate objects. Significant conservation differences between various animate objects also were found. (Author/RL)

It is suggested that the classical conservation justifications (reversibility, compensation, identity, identity action) are both formally and empirically inadequate justifications for the conservation deduction, particularly from a pedagogical perspective. A test for the distinction between true and empirical reversibility, that subjects know of all the reasons, was not supported. (Author/PN)

The shift from preoperational thought to operativity entails the idea of necessity. The concrete operativity tasks were analyzed from this perspective. Results from a broad class of conservation training studies were also analyzed from the perspective of their efficacy, fidelity to necessity, and implications for school instruction. (Author/BW)