Critics and Critical Analysis: Lessons from 19,000 P-12 Students in Candidates' Classrooms

Ever since the 2000 revision to the National Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education's (NCATE; 2013b) standards, schools of education have searched for the most productive ways to measure candidates' impact on student learning. This has been no easy task (Hamel & Merz, 2005). Although candidates are often in student teaching experiences for the better part of a year, the ability to measure candidates' impact on student learning is mitigated by the degree to which the cooperating teacher or university supervisor assists the candidates, the length and continuity of instruction that the candidates provide, and the type and number of assessments the candidates may use. These problems are exacerbated by the difficulties in gathering student learning data that are comparable across candidates, programs, and even schools of education. NCATE realized these problems but did not remove the expectation for measuring candidates' impact on student learning. It suggested a cluster of candidate activities that might provide the required evidence. A candidate (a) undertakes a diagnosis (a pretest) or P-12 student learning in some area he or she will teach; (b) plans an appropriate sequence of instruction to advance P-12 student learning and teaches in ways that engage P-12 students, who bring differing background knowledge and learning needs; (c) conducts some concluding assessment (or posttest) that documents that student learning has occurred, or has not; and (d) reflects on changes in teaching that might have improved the results (NCATE, 2013a, Assessment 5). The merger of the Teacher Education Accreditation Council with NCATE into the Council for the Accreditation of Education Preparation (CAEP) included standards that continue the focus on measuring candidates' impact on student learning (Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation, 2013): Impact on P-12 student learning 4.1 The provider documents, using value-added measures where available, other state-supported P-12 impact measures, and any other measures constructed by the provider, that program completers contribute to an expected level of P-12 student growth. No consistent strategies for gathering student learning data have appeared, even though these accreditation standards have existed for some time. The highly promoted Education Teacher Performance Assessment (edTPA) focuses on using student summative assessment for the whole class and for three students in candidates' classrooms to understand the impact of instruction (American Association for Colleges of Teacher Education, 2013). Those data can vary in type and richness, reducing the comparability across candidates or programs; nor are these data measures of student learning gains per se. Value-added measures (VAM) have been added into the accreditation language over recent years. These measures include the analysis of standardized assessments of student learning designed to address differences in classrooms and students to have equitable comparisons of teacher impact. In most cases, VAM would not be possible for candidates to use because of the small amount of time that candidates student-teach by themselves with the curriculum for which the standardized assessment is designed. Louisiana, among other states (Knight et al., 2012), has addressed this problem by applying VAM assessments to the P-12 students of their candidates who have been tracked into their first years of teaching. Regardless of the efficacy of this approach, it does not address the difficulties that schools of education have tracking an individual candidate's impact on student learning while student teaching and tracking the impact of the program on the candidate's progress over the time the candidate is in the unit's program. After an NCATE review in 2007, we began an effort to have candidates report results on P-12 assessments aligned with units of instruction. …