Educating Teachers in California: What Matters for Teacher Preparedness?

High-quality teacher preparation is a critical building block of an effective and stable teacher workforce. In California, the Commission on Teacher Credentialing (CTC) currently oversees teacher preparation programs (TPPs) at more than 100 institutions, and these programs graduate more than 10,000 teacher candidates per year. Over the past decade, California has considerably revised its statewide licensing and accreditation systems that set standards for teacher preparation and performance expectations for beginning teachers. These new teaching standards emphasize teachers' abilities to teach to the more ambitious student learning standards the state adopted in 2010. Given policy changes and financial investments, what is the state of teacher preparation in California? Based on survey responses from almost 60,000 completers of TPPs across California from 2016-17 to 2020-21, this report describes changes in the pool of newly credentialed teachers over this period of time, how well prepared completers of TPPs feel in different domains of practice, what kind of learning opportunities they encountered, what aspects of preparation explain how prepared completers feel to enter the profession, and how access to preparation experiences varies among different groups of teachers. This analysis also examines the extent to which perceptions of TPP completers align with survey responses from more than 5,000 cooperating teachers working with student teachers and more than 1,500 employers hiring these new teachers. This report begins by describing the landscape of teacher preparation in California. The authors then explain the data and methods used in this report and outline how the composition of the pool of newly credentialed teachers has changed between 2016-17 and 2020-21. They then detail the findings from the analysis of CTC surveys. These findings are organized into three sections: (1) overall perceptions of preparation effectiveness, (2) differences in perceptions of effectiveness by characteristics of preparation, and (3) differential access to highly rated preparation. The report concludes with policy considerations for California and implications for other states. [For the Research Brief, see ED630346.]