Legislative Affairs

The Department of Education (ED) issued its final rule for teacher preparation programs last week, which would place unfunded mandates on PreK-12 schools, districts, tribes, states, and higher education institutions to rate programs and report information to states and ED.

In response, ASBO International and 28 other organizations representing teachers, state leaders, local school leaders, institutions of higher education, and schools and colleges of education sent a coalition letter (attached) to ED expressing our concerns about the rule's administrative burden and costs. The letter says, "Requiring every state to rate each of the 26,000 preparation programs every year using four prescribed metrics is a demanding and costly enterprise for which there is little capacity and even fewer resources at the state, local, and institutional level." 

Among other things, ED's rule would require:

• States to annually report the following information regarding teacher preparation programs:
  • Placement and retention rates of graduates in their first three years of teaching, including placement and retention in high-need schools;
  • Feedback from graduates and their employers on the effectiveness of program preparation;
  • Student learning outcomes measured by novice teachers' student growth, teacher evaluation results, and/or another state-determined measure that is relevant to students' outcomes, including academic performance, and meaningfully differentiates amongst teachers; and
  • Other program characteristics, including assurances that the program has specialized accreditation or graduates candidates with content and pedagogical knowledge, and quality clinical preparation, who have met rigorous exit requirements.

• States to categorize program effectiveness using at least three levels of performance (effective, at-risk, and low-performing), and provide technical assistance to any program rated as low-performing to help it improve.
  
  
• States to design their reporting system in consultation with stakeholders during the 2016-17 academic year. They may choose to use 2017-18 as a pilot year and will fully implement the system in 2018-19. The first year for which any program might lose TEACH grant eligibility will be 2021-2022.

See the full regulation text here. Please stay tuned to this thread for more updates.

Attachment(s)

Teacher prep regs 10-20.pdf   187 KB 1 version