### March 8, 2004

Mr. David G. Imig

President and CEO

American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education

1307 New York Avenue, NW, Suite 300

Washington, DC 20005

Dear Mr. Imig:

This **Final Audit Report** (Control Number ED-OIG/A03-D0021) presents
the results of our audit of the Education Resources Information Center
(ERIC) Clearinghouse on Teaching and Teacher Education (CTTE) at the
American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education (AACTE).

# AUDIT RESULTS

Our audit objective was to determine if ERIC CTTE had adequate
management controls in place to ensure that a range of information on
alternative teacher certification was disseminated by ERIC CTTE for the
period January 1, 2002, through June 30, 2003. For purposes of this
audit, we assessed and classified the significant management controls
into the following categories:

-   The selection and review of articles and documents and the
    preparation and posting of abstracts for Resources in Education
    (RIE) and Current Index to Journals in Education (CIJE).

-   The selection of topics for and preparation of clearinghouse
    publications.

-   The response to AskERIC and other information requests.

We concluded that during the period January 1, 2002, through June 30,
2003, ERIC CTTE had adequate management controls in place to ensure that
a range of information on alternative teacher certification was
disseminated by ERIC CTTE, and that ERIC CTTE provided unbiased
information on the issue of alternative teacher certification.

Because of inherent limitations in any management control structure,
errors may occur and not be detected. Also, projection of any evaluation
of the system to future periods is subject to the risk that procedures
may become inadequate because of changes in conditions, or that the
degree of compliance with the procedures may deteriorate.

## OTHER MATTERS

We noted a minor management control issue that we brought to the
attention of AACTE. AACTE did not have formal policies and procedures in
place to ensure that actual or potential conflicts of interest would be
identified and disclosed to the U.S. Department of Education (the
Department) Contracting Officer, along with the actions to avoid,
mitigate, or neutralize the actual or potential conflict of interest,
pursuant to the contract clause "Organizational Conflicts of Interest."
In a written response, dated December 31, 2003, AACTE noted that in the
unlikely event that a conflict of interest were to arise, experienced
ERIC CTTE staff would follow procedures and protocol detailed in the
contract clause "Organizational Conflicts of Interest." AACTE added that
its objectivity in hosting ERIC CTTE is assured by the diverse nature of
its membership. In addition, AACTE noted that it addressed all
requirements in the most recent contract proposal, and that conflict of
interest was not raised in the contract negotiations or highlighted in
any subsequent correspondence or directives from the Department.

# BACKGROUND

Established in 1966, ERIC is a federally funded, national information
system providing access to education related information. The
Department's Institute of Education Sciences (IES), formerly the Office
of Educational Research and Improvement (OERI), supports ERIC. ERIC
consisted of 16 subject specific clearinghouses, 10 adjunct
clearinghouses, an affiliate clearinghouse, and support components, such
as the ERIC Processing and Reference Facility, which produced and
maintained the ERIC database. The ERIC database contains over one
million records. ERIC components participated in AskERIC, a system-wide
effort to disseminate information through electronic question answering,
digital referencing, and other services. Users of ERIC include education
professionals, students, parents, school board members, researchers, and
journalists. In January 2004, the Department began to implement a
reengineering plan for ERIC; the Department intends to contract with a
vendor or team of vendors to operate an all-inclusive online
bibliographic and full-text ERIC database.

Each ERIC Clearinghouse was a separate contracted entity that collected
and processed data within the scope of its specified education-related
subject matter. The scope of ERIC CTTE covered school personnel issues,
including recruitment, selection, licensing, certification, training,
and pre- and in-service preparation, evaluation, retention, and
retirement; theory, philosophy, and practice of teaching;
organizational, administrative, financial, and legal issues pertaining
to teacher education programs and institutions; and all aspects of
health, physical, recreation, and dance education.

The Department awarded the ERIC CTTE contract (ED99CO0007), valued at
\$2,416,762, to AACTE for the period January 1, 1999, to December 31,
2003. The ERIC CTTE contract called for AACTE to:

-   Acquire, select, and review approximately 1,000 education related
    documents per year. Then, from these selections, prepare
    approximately 700 abstracts for input into ERIC.

-   Review selected education related journals and prepare approximately
    900 abstracts annually for input into ERIC.

-   Prepare approximately 4 major publications, 10 digests, and 5 other
    products per year.

-   Provide user services, such as answering questions and providing
    outreach and training.

AACTE is a national organization of more than 740 liberal arts colleges,
state universities, research institutions, and various education
organizations that prepare teachers and other education personnel. AACTE
represents the institutional interests of its members, gathers and
disseminates data, proposes and analyzes public policy initiatives,
supports professional advancement, and represents the teacher education
community before state and national governments.

**Objective, Scope, and Methodology**

Our audit objective was to determine if ERIC CTTE had adequate
management controls in place to ensure that a range of information on
alternative teacher certification was disseminated by ERIC CTTE for the
period January 1, 2002, through June 30, 2003. To accomplish our audit
objective we interviewed ERIC CTTE's Director and Associate Directors,
the IES Division Director for ERIC, and the Department's Contracting
Officer Representative. We reviewed the ERIC CTTE contract and statement
of work, ERIC CTTE publication plans, and criteria contained in the
*ERIC Processing Manual* for the review, selection, and processing of
abstracts. We also reviewed the following contract deliverables from the
audit period:

-   We randomly selected 2 of the 11 CIJE comprehensive journal titles
    and 4 of the 19 CIJE selective journal titles received by ERIC CTTE
    during the audit period. For each of the randomly selected journal
    issues, we reviewed the extent to which articles were selected for
    abstracts and if the article abstracts were entered into the ERIC
    database. We excluded health, physical education, recreation, and
    dance journals from our review.

-   We reviewed the topics covered by the 95 RIE documents that were
    received by ERIC CTTE during the period March 2002 to June 2003 and
    that were rejected for abstracting, to determine if alternative
    teacher certification was the subject matter of any rejected items.

-   We obtained, from the ERIC Processing and Reference Facility, a file
    of accessioned RIE and CIJE abstracts from January 2002 through
    July 2003. We reviewed all 13 of the 746 abstracts from the RIE
    database and all 4 of the 1,435 abstracts from the CIJE database
    that had alternative teacher certification as the major descriptor,
    which indicates the primary subject of the document or article. The
    abstracts were reviewed to determine the nature (i.e., supportive,
    critical, or neutral regarding alternative teacher certification) of
    the information presented.

-   We reviewed ERIC CTTE\'s 2002 and 2003 proposed publication plans to
    determine which proposed publications relating to alternative
    teacher certification were issued, and if not issued, the reason
    why.

-   We reviewed the 4 major publications, 10 Digests, and 8 other
    publications and products issued by ERIC CTTE, during the audit
    period, to determine if the publications covered the issue of
    alternative teacher certification. We then reviewed the one major
    publication and two Digests that were pertinent to the issue of
    alternative teacher certification, to determine the nature (i.e.,
    supportive, critical, or neutral regarding alternative teacher
    certification) of the information presented.

-   Of the 10 monthly phone/correspondence logs on file at ERIC CTTE for
    our audit period, we judgmentally selected the log for the last
    month in the audit period, June 2003. We also randomly selected the
    log for November 2002. We reviewed the two selected monthly logs,
    containing 70 information requests, to determine the topics of the
    information requests. We reviewed the two information requests that
    concerned the topic of alternative teacher certification to
    determine the nature (i.e., supportive, critical, or neutral
    regarding alternative teacher certification) of the information
    provided.

-   We reviewed 113 AskERIC e-mail information requests received during
    the audit period. AskERIC requests that provided CTTE the option of
    providing either supportive or critical information regarding
    alternative teacher certification were considered pertinent to our
    review. We noted 12 e-mail files consisting of 7 AskERIC responses
    that we determined were pertinent to our review. We reviewed the 7
    e-mail responses provided by ERIC CTTE to determine the nature
    (i.e., supportive, critical, or neutral regarding alternative
    teacher certification) of the information provided.

To achieve the audit objective, we relied, in part, on
computer-processed data contained in the ERIC Master File and ERIC Data
Validation and Processing System (EDVAPS), specifically the accessioned
RIE and CIJE abstracts and rejected RIE documents, respectively. We
assessed the reliability of this data by comparing the file record
counts of both the ERIC Master File and EDVAPS data. We also performed
tests of the accuracy and completeness of the ERIC Master File\'s
abstracts pertaining to alternative teacher certification by comparing
the data to search results obtained from the online ERIC database. Based
upon our preliminary data assessment, we concluded that the ERIC Master
File and EDVAPS data were sufficiently reliable for use in meeting the
audit objective.

We conducted on-site fieldwork from October 1, 2003, through October 3,
2003, at the AACTE offices in Washington, D.C. We held the exit
conference on January 20, 2004. Our audit was performed in accordance
with generally accepted government auditing standards appropriate to the
scope of the review described above.

In accordance with the Freedom of Information Act (5 U.S.C. § 552),
reports issued by the Office of the Inspector General are available to
members of the press and general public to the extent information
contained therein is not subject to exemptions in the Act.

We appreciate the cooperation and assistance extended by your staff
during the audit. You are not required to respond to this report. If you
desire to discuss it, please call Teri Lewis, Assistant Regional
Inspector General for Audit, or me at (215) 656-6900.

> Sincerely,
>
> /s/
>
> Bernard Tadley
>
> Regional Inspector General for Audit

cc: Mary Dilworth, Vice President for Research and Information, AACTE