EDUCATION BOARD CALLS FOR UNIFIED TEACHER CERTIFICATION STANDARDS

Teachers and the colleges that prepare them currently face an array of standards depending on a teacher’s specialty and other factors. The State Board of Education asked the Professional Standards Commission for Teachers to boil all those standards into a single coherent document as one of the first steps for coming changes to teacher preparation program approval.

The board also supported plans by the Department of Education to ditch its current periodic review of teacher education programs in favor of requiring the programs to receive national accreditation.

The Framework for Excellence in Teacher Preparation would provide a single point for teacher colleges to look for the standards they need to meet. But it also could provide a starting point for the board to consider changes to those standards.

Board members, as they were approving the additional charges to the PSCT Tuesday afternoon also sought to discuss lists of guidelines for the commission in its consolidation work.

“With just rearranging the deck chairs I will not be a happy camper,” said board member Elizabeth Bauer (D-Birmingham). She argued there were additional standards that needed to be addressed.

Ms. Bauer and others were concerned that the commission would come back with recommendations that would have to be sent back to it for more work because it did not meet the board’s requirements. The concern was particularly pointed given earlier discussions on the need to appropriately staff the commission to fulfill its new charges, which include developing new processes for alternative teacher certification.

John Austin (D-Ann Arbor), the board’s liaison to the commission, said he would also be able to bring the board regular reports on the commission’s work and bring the commission any concerns the board might raise.

Flora Jenkins, head of the Office of Professional Preparation and Certification Services, noted that her staff was still working on new standards for professional teachers and for elementary teachers.

While the board did not add any guidelines for the standards at Tuesday’s meeting, it did plan a future workshop on the issue with the possibility of providing the commission additional direction after that event.

Board member Nancy Danhof (R-East Lansing) also questioned the timing of some of the proposed changes in the certification process. Part of the recommendation is a research collaborative, which is scheduled to have its first forum in May 2009, but Ms. Danhof argued the collaborative should also have input into the certification standards and particularly into the new processes for alternative certification, which are due to be in place in early 2009.

Mr. Flanagan and others said the forum would be an opportunity for the universities involved to present their research publicly. He said there could be opportunities to have university input on some of the propos-als before they are adopted.

But Chief Academic Officer Sally Vaughn said there could also be need to look again at the timelines for some of the implementation plans.

The board’s action also prepared the teacher colleges for a coming change in how they are reviewed. The plan, outlined last month by Superintendent of Public Instruction Michael Flanagan and others, would leave the department with initial authority to approve teacher preparation programs, as well as review of all pro-grams if there are significant changes in standards.

But the current periodic review would be dropped in favor of having the schools accredited by one of the two national organizations.

Though the change was supported by the majority of teacher preparation colleges, the board did try to ad-dress in its support motion some concerns raised about the accreditation process.

One of the two accrediting bodies, the National Association for the Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE), requires accreditation not only of the program as a whole but of each of the specialty disciplines. While the overall accreditation system is adjusted for each state to align with its standards, the require-ments for the specialties are not aligned, said Karen Adams, dean of the College of Education and Human Services at Central Michigan University.

Under the board’s motion, the state’s standards would not require that the program have each specialty ac-credited.

The plan would require all teacher colleges to be accredited by 2013, which both department officials and education deans said would be sufficient time to make the change.

Ms. Adams said there are already six of the public universities that are nationally accredited and two more that are in the process of gaining accreditation.

Edward Blews, president of the Association of Independent Colleges and Universities of Michigan, said some of his members also were nationally accredited but that others were looking at it. “They recognize that is the wave,” he said.

But Mr. Blews argued it was not fair to call those not accredited by NCATE or TEAC, the other body, unac-credited. He said all had been approved by the state and were accredited regionally by the North Central Association.

The public university deans argued the state process as it currently exists is not rigorous enough, largely because of lack of staff.

“When I worked at another program in the state we chose the state approval because we had problems and we knew they wouldn’t come to light through the state process,” said Susanne Chandler, dean of the School Education and Human Services at the University of Michigan-Flint.

Ms. Jenkins admitted the state reviews were not as strong as they could be and said that was the primary reason for her office urging the change.

“There are just things that we can’t do in this new world,” Mr. Flanagan said. It was not the first time, or the last, during the meeting that he pushed for the Legislature to approve sufficient funding for the depart-ment to fill at least some of its empty posts.

The universities have argued the change also saves them money because they do not have to pay for both the accreditation and the state review.

The change is technically under the purview of the state superintendent, but Mr. Flanagan said he did not want to move forward with the plan without support from the board.

That support was a little sparse at the beginning of discussions, with several members concerned the state was giving up authority over certification standards. But they said most of their concerns had been ad-dressed in the various discussions.

Ms. Bauer, for instance, was concerned that the accreditation process resembled what she had seen in healthcare where the reviewers were associates of the facility administrators and often gave them passes on issues.

Ms. Adams said at least NCATE, for which she had been on a review team, did not allow members of the re-view team to know staff at the institution under review and used a training process to be sure the teams were fair and did not miss things. She noted both NCATE and TEAC provided lists of schools they had re-viewed that included accredited schools and schools put on probation because they had not met standards.