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Accreditation for a teacher education program means that an independent third party has found that the program actually lives up to its promises to students and the public. It means that the academic degree or credential a student earns has been found to have value because it satisfies a set of standards set by the higher education and professional communities. While accreditation cannot provide a guarantee on these matters, accreditation tells the public that panels of experts have confidence in the continuing value and worth of a program. This essay describes the accreditation process for teacher education programs and considers its role in ensuring that teachers are prepared to teach in the culturally diverse classrooms of the 21st century.

Accreditation is accomplished by a unique quality assurance process in the United States that both assists institutions of higher education to improve according to a set of standards set by peers and shows that they satisfy those standards. It is unique because it is voluntary and conducted by the higher education community itself. Many feel that the envied success of American higher education can be traced to the fact that the nation promotes and facilitates higher levels of quality and encourages innovation through this voluntary system of quality monitoring and assurance by peers and competitors, rather than by imposing federal standards on colleges and universities.

Accreditation is a both a process and a status. Accreditation is the process of reviewing colleges, universities, institutions, and programs to judge their educational quality—how well they serve their students and society. The process, if successful, results in accredited status for programs or institutions. The accreditor in fact makes two related status decisions—whether the program or institution satisfies its standards now and how long into the future the accreditor is willing to bet that the program will continue to satisfy the accreditor's standards (the term limit for the accreditation status).

Accreditation Process and Standards

Some accrediting organizations review colleges and universities. Others review only specific programs within colleges and universities, such as those offered by schools of law, medicine, engineering, and teacher education. Surprisingly, the majority of the states (42, or 84%) do not require the teacher education programs in their states to be accredited. Unlike their practices for most other professions, which do require accreditation, they are willing to award the state's professional teaching license to the graduates of both unaccredited and accredited professional programs. The remaining eight states require accreditation from one of the two national accreditors of teacher education programs—the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) or the Teacher Education Accreditation Council (TEAC), both in Washington, D.C. In a few states, this requirement pertains only to programs at public institutions. Between them, NCATE and TEAC accredit more than 900 of the 1,400 teacher education programs in the nation. These 900 institutions are the largest producers of new teachers annually. Both accreditors have consolidated their accrediting work into a new accrediting organization, the Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation (CAEP), that will offer the nation's education schools a choice of accreditation systems that will presumably encourage even more educator preparation programs to become accredited.

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