By Stephen Sawchuk
(Education Week, August 27, 2012)
A wide swath of advocacy organizations, nonprofits, and teacher-training groups this morning sent a letter to U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan demanding “deliberate and swift administrative action” to update the federal rules that govern teacher-preparation program accountability.
As you should know from Education Week’s exhaustive (and exhausting?) coverage, the Education Department earlier this year pursued a negotiated-rulemaking process to tie these accountability rules, governed by Title II of the Higher Education Act, to a federal aid program known as TEACH. It wants only high-performing programs to be permitted to offer TEACH scholarships, which subsidize aid for teacher-candidates who teach in shortage subjects in high-need schools for four years. Those negotiations fell apart earlier this year, meaning that the Education Department gets to write the rules on its own.
While we don’t know what the final rules will look like, they’re likely to correspond to the agency’s blueprint for teacher-preparation reform, which would also require states to measure the impact of preparation programs’ graduates on student learning, among other things.
Read the full post here.