Teacher Education Accreditation Council (TEAC)

A New System for Accreditation

TEAC accreditation centers around a system of faculty inquiry into the quality of their education programs. The focus is on questions such as: What do we (as teacher education institutions) claim about our graduates? What is the evidence we use to determine whether we meet these claims? Why do we rely on this evidence? Is the evidence sufficient to convince others? While questions like these drive accreditation generally, TEAC encourages faculty to start their inquiry with the mission, goals, and claims of the program and the institution rather than to measure their effectiveness against standards set by others. The program's self-study results in an Inquiry Brief that documents the evidence it relies upon that graduates know the subject(s) they will teach, know a variety of ways to teach students with differing skills and backgrounds, and are caring and effective teachers whose students learn. Additionally, faculty include evidence that graduates have mastered the content and skills of a liberal arts education. Finally, faculty describe how they examine the quality control system to determine whether it yields reliable and valid evidence about the program's practices and results. This inquiry-driven, evidence-based accreditation model lends itself to an ongoing and continuous improvement process that integrates routine program review and self-analysis with accreditation.

TEAC accreditation differs from other accreditors in three important ways. First, TEAC initiated an accreditation-by-audit process by which, as part of the self-study, faculty conduct an internal academic audit to examine how the program manages quality, testing each policy and practice to determine if the system functions as designed. In its site visit, the TEAC audit team checks the program's claims and evidence and reports on whether the cited evidence is accurate and trustworthy and whether the program is able to ensure quality. Second, it focuses on evidence of candidate learning as the sine qua non of program evaluation. The quality of the evidence and the quality of the system that produced it are the two key factors in the TEAC accreditation decision. Third, TEAC promotes the development of an evidentiary base for teacher education. Although teaching has many of the elements of a profession (professional degrees, licenses, certificates, national examinations, accreditation, state program approval, tenure reviews, recertification, professional development requirements, professional associations, etc.), none of these elements seems to provide much confidence. In times of teacher shortages, state and district leaders willingly ignore or waive any of the above; many education reformers even recommend terminating one or more of these elements as a means to improve teacher quality; and teacher education programs themselves do not embrace accreditation as a vehicle for quality assurance. Of the approximately 1,500 colleges, schools, and departments of education that produce teachers and school administrators, only 43% are nationally accredited.

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