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Deja Vu
05/06/09
05:19:25 am, Categories: Announcements [A] I’m still catching up here from technological glitches and recovery from the swine flu a bad cold. So bear with me while I clear out the inbox over the next several days.
Two weeks ago, Stephen Sawchuk at Teacher Beat reported a back and forth he had with the President of the America Association of Colleges of Teacher Education, Sharon Robinson. Sawchuk said teacher colleges had "gamed" the accountability requirements of HEA (1998) that require ed schools to report the scores of their graduates on teacher licensing tests. Ms. Robinson disagreed:
"Under the previous law, universities had to report passage of all graduates on state licensing exams, even candidates for licensure that had not completed the program."
"Under the new law [2008], universities must report scores for those who have completed required course work. This change … makes the implications of pass-rates more directly related to program quality and accountability. …"
Sawchuk, however is right about the gaming, as I and others who were involved in the 1998 law (including fellow blogger, former Senate staffer Alexander Russo) can attest. It sounds like AACTE has come around, but we’ll have to see how things play out as the new HEA provisions are implemented.
In 1998, Senator Jeff Bingaman and Congressman George Miller proposed that ed schools with chronically high failure rates (30%) on teacher licensing exams not be allowed to use federal funds to enroll students. A Congressional Research Service analysis at the time indicated that schools of education received $2 billion a year in federal aid. It seemed to make little sense to subsidize schools in which 30% or more graduates could not qualify for the jobs they were trained for.
AACTE - in fact the entire higher ed umbrella lobbying agency, the American Council on Education - opposed the provision.
Offers to work with them to find a workable compromise were rebuffed. One high-ranking ACE official told me point blank at the time that they would never assist in making such a provision workable.
You can check out this piece from an April, 1998 issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education to get a sense of how heated the debate was. AACTE at the time, for example, advanced the specious argument that reporting institution-level scores would somehow violate individual students’ privacy. AACTE is now acknowledging what we pointed out at the time - medical schools, law schools, and other professional programs routinely report such scores with no violations of student privacy,
At the end of the legislative day, what we settled for was a requirement that schools simply report the passage rates of their graduates.
But then came the regulatory process. And that’s where the real gaming came in.
In the regulatory process, AACTE and ACE (and the NEA) got the Clinton Administration to substitute the word "program completer" for the tem "graduate." In other words, a student could graduate from a teacher ed program, be handed a degree but, if they did not pass their licensure test, would not be considered a "program completer" for the purposes of HEA. This was not a distinction such programs previously made.
This, in turn, caused a magic wand to be waved over virtually every school of ed in the country - they now all had 100% pass rates, because on paper, even those who had been handed degrees from schools of ed technically hadn’t completed the program because they didn’t pass the state board tests. The feds wasted their money, the student was handed a potentially worthless degree, but the school of ed comes out smelling like a rose. Clever, huh?
I’d like to give Ms. Robinson the benefit of the doubt on this, but if you notice, she maintains that the 1998 law required reporting for graduates (we intended it to but AACTE, ACE, and NEA ensured that it did not) and still uses the "program completer" language in her (I think misleading) comments to Sawchuk.
Since Ms. Robinson uses the medical school example on Sawchuk’s blog, let’s extend the example: do medical schools graduate students from the school of medicine but then retroactively cook the books when they don’t pass their boards and say they did not complete the doctor training program? (the answer is no; that’s why med schools, law schools, etc, unlike schools of ed, don’t have 100% pass rates).
Yet again, what passes muster in the education policy world wouldn’t pass the laugh test in other fields.
I wouldn’t say that the provision has had no impact. Reports are that most students are told that they are being given a degree but are not being counted as "completing the program." In 2007, ETS reported a significant uptick in teacher ed students’ GPA’s and SAT scores, and attributed it in part to the reporting requirements. And the trend holds across racial and ethnic groups, refuting another assertion made back in 1998 that the accountability provisions would work against minority students.
Still, I wonder whether in hiring teachers school districts make the distinction between "program completers" and "graduates." Do non-program completing graduates get hired on provisional permits? Can they fail a licensure test in the field they were trained for (say math or science), not be considered a program completer, but get licensed anyway through passing an easier test, say phys ed or social science (and then be mis-assigned to teach algebra anyway?)
It would be great to have answers to these questions. But don’t expect to get straight answers from AACTE, at least the AACTE that I came to know and love.
What remains to be seen is how genuinely AACTE and, more broadly ACE, work to implement the the 2008 HEA revisions as they are implemented by the new Administration. A word to the wise: keep an eye on the fine print.
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