CAEP Advanced Standards and the Future of Graduate Programs: The False Sense of "Techne".

Every advance in technical rationality today is surpassed by a decline in common sense and a growing irrationality, the signs of which are everywhere. (Stivers, 2001, p. 201) As top-down mandates multiply, close supervision from outside the education field increases, and the professionalism of educators shrinks, criticism of neoliberal effects on education in the United States and elsewhere has become more frequent in professional publications. Neoliberalism, put simply, is the political philosophy that privileges free market economics above all else and, in education, advocates high-stakes testing, prepackaged curricula, stringent measures of accountability for schools and educators, and the privatization of public schools. Business efficiency is the governing value, and it is measured in numbers. Neoliberalism among policy makers and politicians may explain a great deal of what passes as school reform at all levels today. However, in teacher education, where the same growing constraints can be found, one finds very little resistance among teacher educators in the United States, especially as such mandates are now being applied, in detail, to graduate programs. Why? Are teacher educators, college professors, unconcerned about their curricula being decided by others and indifferent to their work being reduced to rubrics and regulations? This article offers another possible explanation for the passive acceptance of high-stakes testing, data-driven accountability measures, and the questionable approach to teaching and learning that characterize much of the Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation (CAEP), formerly the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE), teacher education accreditation process in the United States. Most recently, as of June 4, 2014, the CAEP Board of Directors has "approved and adopted" the Standards for Advanced Programs, which "mirror the same principles of rigor, evidence and outcomes focus of CAEP Standards" (for initial teacher certification) to all graduate programs, according to the CAEP Web site (Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation [CAEP], 2014b). Lack of objection to what is happening in teacher education, in particular in departments of curriculum and teaching, among the participants themselves may have much to do with a culture dominated by techne. Ideas about techne from French sociologist Jacques Ellul, as well as others, are used to establish the false sense of assurance CAEP offers, in particular through analysis of the Standards for Advanced Programs (CAEP, 2014b) and other CAEP documents. The Advanced Standards apply to teachers "preparing for a second license at the graduate level in a field different from" their first; teachers seeking "a master's degree in the field in which they teach"; "programs not tied to licensure," such as programs in curriculum studies or educational foundations; and "programs for other school professionals," such as counselors, administrators, and reading specialists. The CAEP Advanced Standards are, in fact, almost identical to those in place for undergraduate or initial certification programs; the chart CAEP offers places the Advanced Standards across from the initial Standards, and the Advanced Standards are simply somewhat shorter. Therefore previous critiques of CAEP or its former incarnation, NCATE, are worth revisiting, although these critiques remain rare in the professional literature. Allington (2005), past president of the International Reading Association, discussed how NCATE undermined "our efforts to develop thoughtful, autonomous, and effective teachers" (p. 199). Taubman (2009) demonstrated that NCATE created an "audit culture," in which "professional judgment and wisdom were being replaced by a measurable, defendable, and supposedly neutral process, in which educators and students themselves were reconstructed in terms of quantifiable outcomes" (p. …