The Initial Report of the Secretary on the Quality of Teacher Preparation
Author: Office of Postsecondary Education (ED)
Date: 2000-00-00
Type: Reports - Research
Subjects: Teacher Education Programs,Preservice Teacher Education,Educational Quality,Accountability,Teacher Certification,Licensing Examinations (Professions),Graduation Requirements,State Standards,Higher Education,Educational Legislation,Federal Legislation

Recognizing the growing importance of the quality of teaching in America's schools and the need to prepare a record number of teachers in the coming years, the Congress included a new focus on improving teacher preparation when it reauthorized the Higher Education Act in 1998. Title II of the new law created three Teacher Quality Enhancement Grant programs designed to fund the efforts of states, institutions of higher education, and school districts to strengthen the recruitment, preparation, licensing, and support of new teachers. Members of Congress wanted to do more than invest federal funds in promising efforts, however. They also included in Title II accountability provisions aimed at providing better information about the quality of teacher preparation, certification, and licensure. Section 207 of Title II requires that states and higher education institutions report on teacher preparation program characteristics, standards and requirements for certification and licensure, including assessments, and alternative routes to teacher certification. Title II also calls for the collection of information on the proportion of teaching candidates passing required assessments (&quot;pass rates&quot;), and the proportion of teachers who are not certified or licensed or who are teaching in a field in which they are not certified or endorsed (teachers on &quot;waivers&quot;). This Initial Report of the Secretary of Education to the Congress is the first in a series of mandated reporting activities. It includes information on three of the nine topics on which the Congress has mandated annual reports starting in the year 2001. The information included in the report is based only on data readily available in the states when surveyed this spring. Each state was required to report only what data and information it had on hand, using its own definitions and reporting formats. For this reason, the data are incomplete in many cases. This Initial Report makes clear that states do not have a uniform set of standards for teachers that the public can use to measure the performance of the profession. Therefore, the report provides not a means for making detailed comparisons, but baselines for individual states against which their progress in strengthening standards for teachers can be measured over time. The Initial Report provides, when available: (1) a description of the teacher certification and licensure assessments, and any other certification and licensure requirements, that each state uses; (2) the percentage of teaching candidates who passed each of the assessments that a state uses for teacher certification and licensure, disaggregated and ranked, by the teacher preparation program in that state from which teaching candidates received their most recent degree; and (3) information on the extent to which teachers in the state receive waivers of state certification or licensure requirements, including the proportion of these teachers distributed across the high- and low-poverty school districts and across subject areas.