The provider demonstrates that the quality of candidates is a continuing and purposeful part of its responsibility from recruitment, at admission, through the progression of courses and clinical experiences, and to decisions that completers are prepared to teach effectively and are recommended for certification.Plan for Recruitment3.1 The provider presents plans and goals for strategic and recruitment outreach to recruit high quality candidates from a broad range of backgrounds and diverse populations to accomplish their mission. Recruitment of Diverse Teacher Candidates 3.2 The provider documents goals, efforts and results for the admitted pool of candidates that demonstrate the diversity of America’s P-12 students (including students with disabilities, exceptionalities, and diversity based on ethnicity, race, socioeconomic status, gender, language, religion, sexual identification, and geographic origin). Recruitment to Meet Employment Needs 3.3 The provider demonstrates efforts to know and address community, state, national, or regional or local needs for hard to staff schools and shortage fields, including STEM, English language learning, and students with disabilities. Admission standards indicate that candidates have high academic achievement and ability 3.4 The provider sets admissions requirements, including CAEP minimum criteria or the state’s minimum criteria, whichever are higher, and gathers data to monitor applicants and the selected pool of candidates.  The provider ensures that the average GPA of its accepted cohort of candidates meets or exceeds the CAEP minimum GPA of 3.0 and a group average performance in the top third of those who pass a nationally normed admissions assessment such as ACT, SAT or GRE.[i]  The provider demonstrates that the standard for high academic achievement and ability is met through multiple evaluations and sources of evidence.  If a program has a model that predicts effective teaching empirically as measured in reliable and valid ways, the cohort group floor must be above the mean of the predicted measure. Additional selectivity factors 3.5 Provider preparation programs establish and monitor attributes beyond academic ability that candidates must demonstrate at admissions and during the program.  The provider selects criteria, describes the measures used and evidence of the reliability and validity of those measures, and reports data that show how the academic and non-academic factors deemed important in the selection process and for development during preparation, predict candidate performance in the program and effective teaching. Selectivity during preparation 3.6 The provider creates criteria for program progression and monitors candidates’ advancement from admissions through completion.  All candidates demonstrate the ability to teach to college and career ready standards.  Providers present multiple forms of evidence to indicate candidates’ developing content knowledge, pedagogical content knowledge, and pedagogical skills, including the effective use of technology. Selection at completion 3.7 Before the provider recommends any completing candidate for licensure or certification, it documents that the candidate has reached a high standard for content knowledge in the fields where certification is sought, and can teach effectively with positive impacts P-12 student learning. 3.8 Before the provider recommends any completing candidate for licensure or certification, it documents that the candidate understands the expectations of the profession including codes of ethics, professional standards of practice, and relevant laws and policies.

Rationale

Educator Preparation Providers have a critical responsibility to ensure the quality of their candidates.  This responsibility continues from purposeful recruitment that helps fulfill the provider’s mission, to admissions selectivity that builds an able and diverse pool of candidates, through monitoring of candidate progress and providing necessary support, and to demonstrating that candidates are proficient at completion and that they are selected for employment opportunities that are available in areas served by the provider.  The integration of recruitment and selectivity as EPP responsibilities to ensure quality is emphasized in a recent National Research Council report:[ii]

The quality of new teachers entering the field depends not only on the quality of the preparation they receive, but also on the capacity of preparation programs to attract and select academically able people who have the potential to be effective teachers.  Attracting able, high-quality candidates to teaching is a critical goal.

The majority of American educators are White, middle class, and female.[iii]  A 2006 study reported 75% of teachers are female, 84% are White.[iv]  The makeup of the nation’s teacher workforce has not kept up with the changing demographics.  At the national level, students of color make up more than 40% of the public school population, while teachers of color are only 17% of the teaching force.[v]  The mismatch has consequences.  Goldhaber and Hansen[vi] found that student achievement is positively impacted by a racial/ethnicity match between teachers and students.

While recruitment of talented minority candidates is a time- and labor-intensive process,[vii] “teachers of color and culturally competent teachers must be actively recruited and supported.”[viii]   Recruitment can both increase the quality of selected candidates and offset potentially deleterious effects on diversity from more selective criteria—either at admissions or throughout a program.[ix]  “Successful programs recruit minority teachers with a high likelihood of being effective in the classroom” and “concentrate on finding candidates with a core set of competencies that will translate to success in the classroom.” [x] There is evidence that providers of alternative pathways to teaching have been more successful in attracting non-White candidates.  Feistritzer reports alternative provider cohorts that are 30% non-White, compared with 13% in traditional programs.[xi]

The 2010 NCATE Panel on Clinical Partnerships advocated attention to employment needs as a way to secure greater alignment between the teacher market and areas of teacher preparation.[xii]  The federal Department of Education regularly releases lists of teacher shortages by both content area specialization and state.[xiii]  Some states also publish supply and demand trends and forecasts and other information on market needs.  These lists could assist EPP programs in shaping their preparation program offerings and in setting recruitment goals.

There is a broad public consensus that providers should attract and select able candidates who will become effective teachers.   The 2011 Gallup Phi Delta Kappan education poll[xiv] reported that 76% of the U. S. adult public agreed that “high-achieving” high school students should be recruited to become teachers.  Another example is found in a recent AFT report on teacher preparation.[xv]  AFT seeks to “attract academically capable students with authentic commitment to work with children” and would set GPA requirements at 3.0, SATs at 1100 and ACT scores at 24.0.

Researchers conclude that academic quality, especially in verbal ability and math knowledge, impacts teacher effectiveness.[xvi]  A study for McKinsey and Company[xvii] found that high performing countries had a rigorous selection process similar to that of medical schools.  Whitehurst[xviii] suggests that education providers should be much more selective in terms of their candidates’ cognitive abilities.  When looking at the cost of teacher selection, Levin[xix] found “that recruiting and retaining teachers with higher verbal scores is five to ten times as effective per dollar of teacher expenditure in raising achievement scores of students as the strategy of obtaining teachers with more experience.”  Rockoff and others[xx]  concluded that “teachers’ cognitive and non-cognitive skills…have a moderately large and statistically significant relationship with student and teacher outcomes, particularly with student test scores.”

In measuring teachers’ cognitive and non-cognitive skills, researchers have found that both cognitive and non-cognitive factors “have a moderately large and statistically significant relationship with student and teacher outcomes, particularly with student test scores.”[xxi]  There is strong support from the professional community that qualities outside of academic ability are associated with teacher effectiveness.   These include grit, the ability to work with parents, the ability to motivate, communication skills, focus, purpose, and leadership, among others.  Duckworth et al[xxii] found “that the achievement of difficult goals entails not only talent but also the sustained and focused application of talent over time.”  A Teach for America study[xxiii] concluded that a teacher’s academic achievement, leadership experience, and perseverance are associated with student gains in math, while leadership experience and commitment to the TFA mission were associated with gains in English.  Danielson asserts that “teacher learning becomes more active through experimentation and inquiry, as well as through writing, dialogue, and questioning.”[xxiv]  In addition, teacher evaluations involve “observations of classroom teaching, which can engage teachers in those activities known to promote learning, namely, self-assessment, reflection on practice, and professional conversation.”  These “other” attributes and abilities lend themselves to provider innovation.  Some providers might emphasize certain attributes because of the employment field or market for which they are preparing teachers.

Several researchers, including Deborah Ball in mathematics education, the MET study[xxv] on components of teaching, and skills approaches such as Lamov‘s Teach Like a Champion, assert there are important critical pedagogical strategies that develop over time.  Henry,[xxvi] Noell and Burns,[xxvii]  and Whitehurst[xxviii] all found that, in general, teachers became more effective as they gained experience.  Both research, as synthesized by the National Research Council,[xxix] and professional consensus, as represented by the Council of Chief State School Officers InTASC standards,[xxx] indicate that the development of effective teaching is a process.

There are various sets of criteria and standards for effective teaching and teacher education; many include performance tasks[xxxi] and artifacts created by the teacher candidate.[xxxii]  These standards, like the ones the CAEP Commission has drafted, have a central focus on P-12 learning.  Student learning should be a criterion for selecting candidates for advancement throughout preparation.  The evidence indicators that appear below can be used to monitor and guide candidates’ growth during a program.  The Commission’s draft standard 4 in this report is built around the ultimate impact that program completers have when they are actually employed in the classroom or other educator positions.

Many professional efforts to define standards for teaching (e.g., inTASC; CCSSO, NCTQ, and also rubrics for teaching in observational measures covered in the Gates foundation Measures of Effective Teaching study) recommend that candidates know and practice ethics and  standards of  professional practice as described in these national standards (such as those in InTASC standard 9 and 9(o)).  The Commission recommends that CAEP strongly encourage additional research to define professional practices of P-12 educators, and how these practices, beliefs, and attitudes relate to student learning.  (See also CAEP standard 1.9 on equity responsibilities.)

However, many measures of both academic and non-academic factors associated with high quality teaching and learning need to be studied for reliability, validity and fairness.  CAEP should encourage development and research related to these measures.  It would be shortsighted to specify particular metrics narrowly because of the now fast-evolving interest in, insistence on, and development of new and much stronger preparation assessments, observational measures, student surveys, and descriptive metrics.  Instead, CAEP should ask that providers make a case that the data used in decision-making are valid, reliable and fair.  States and localities are developing their own systems of monitoring and both providers and CAEP should obtain the data from these systems, where available, to use as valuable external indicators for continuous improvement.

Examples of Evidence

On recruitment:

a. Strategic recruitment plans to achieve the EPP mission, taking account of employment opportunities for its completers, needs to serve increasingly diverse populations, and meeting needs for STEM, ELL, special education and other shortage areas

• Plans define outreach efforts to locate and target high quality applicants from a broad range of backgrounds and diverse populations
• Plans contain specific numerical goals and base data
• Progress is monitored and analyzed annually
• Judgments are made about the adequacy of progress toward recruitment goals
• Data are used to make changes in recruitment efforts
• Movement of resources toward the identified areas and away from low need areas is monitored 
• Evidence of marketing and recruitment to high schools and colleges that are racially and culturally diverse and reflecting opportunities and needs in areas of shortages
• Evidence of collaboration with other providers, states, and  school districts could be an indicator of outreach and provide an awareness of employment needs and opportunities

On admissions in addition to the CAEP floor described in Standard 3.4:

b. Providers set other admissions requirements such as:

• High school course taking indicating rigorous courses (e.g., Advanced Placement, higher level math and languages)
• Academic awards achieved

On non-academic factors at admissions or during the preparation experiences:[xxxiii]

c. Programs demonstrate how they assess non-academic qualities of candidates and how these qualities relate to teacher performance.  Examples might include student self-assessments, letters of recommendation, Interviews, essays, leadership, surveys, Gallup measures, Strength finder 2/0, Meyers-Briggs, and personality tests.
d. Other examples illustrate candidate commitment and dispositions, such as (1) teaching, volunteerism, coaching, civic organizations, commitment to urban issues; (2) content related, goal oriented, data-driven, contributions/ value-add to current employer or organization; (3) mindsets/ dispositions/ characteristics such as coachability, empathy, teacher presence or “withitness,”[xxxiv] cultural competency, collaboration, beliefs that all children can learn; or (4) professionalism, perseverance, ethical practice, strategic thinking, abilities to build trusting, supportive relationships with students and families

During preparation:

e. The edTPA test,[xxxv] Renaissance, Teacher Work Samples.  Sample measures that often appear in these forms of assessment are:

• Differentiated instruction based on group and subgroup results on teacher created or standardized assessments (ELL, special education, gifted, high needs students, etc.)
• Evidence of differentiated instruction in response to student test data
• Evidence of teacher reflection on practice.

f. analysis of video recorded lessons with review and evaluation using rubrics, rater rules and agreement levels
g. observation measures with trained review procedures, faculty peer observations with rubrics
h. appropriate performance measures, including those required by a state
i. content knowledge assessments, standardized test data and general education and content course grades throughout the program with at least a 3.0 average and 3.5 in practica courses.
j. Assessments of specialized abilities when appropriate, such as math content tests or ability to teach reading (as applicable to reading  and other content teachers)
k. Data provided by states on student achievement, teacher observations, student and employer surveys (NOTE: see also the Commission’s recommendations for Standard 4)
l. Evidence of candidate ability to design and use a variety of formative assessments with PK-12 students

At completion

m. Provider criteria that qualify candidates for completion, with program performance documenting that all completers have reached a high standard for content knowledge
n. Provider criteria that qualify candidates for completion, with program performance documenting that all completers can teach effectively with positive impact on P-12 student learning
o. Provider criteria that qualify candidates for completion, with program performance information indicating that all completers understand expectations set out in codes of ethics, professional standards of practice, and relevant laws and policy

REFERENCES