New kid on the Teacher Education Accreditation block under fire

CRITICS ARE CALLING THE TEACHER Education Accreditation Council (TEAC), the new national association that accredits undergraduate and graduate programs in teacher education, a politically motivated imposter designed to overcome the public's dissatisfaction with teacher quality. The critics argue that institutions unable to meet the standards of the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE), which had been the sole assessor of teachereducation programs since 1954, are turning to TEAC, which evaluates programs by determining how well they meet their own standards. NCATE, a coalition of thirty-three professional associations, provides accreditation based on national standards designed for the teaching profession as a whole.

"TEAC, if in fact it does maintain the idea of allowing institutions to set their own standards and their own processes for evaluation, really could be a kind of consumer fraud," Linda DarlingHammond, an education professor at Stanford University and the executive director of the National Commission on Teaching and America's Future, told the Chronicle of Higher Education. "Accreditation, to the public, means institutions have met external standards." (See pages 26-33 for an article on teacher education by DarlingHammond.)

The Council of Independent Colleges (CIC), an organization made up of about 420 presidents of small liberal arts colleges, spearheaded TEAC's formation. Besides questioning the adequacy of NCATE's assessment standards, many of CIC's member colleges, as well as several research universities, criticized its accreditation process as being too lengthy and expensive. Since NCATE raised its standards in 1988, nearly a third of the teacher-education programs it has evaluated have lost their accreditation. NCATE also doubled its fees at about the same time.

TEAC officials say a second voice is needed in accreditation because fewer than half of the nearly thirteen hundred teacher education programs in the country are accredited, and because higher education faculty, administrators, and others have expressed an interest in different approaches to producing quality professional education programs. TEAC claims that the standards used by NCATE have not been shown to produce better teachers.

TEAC plans this spring to petition the U.S. Department of Education for recognition so that it can begin accrediting programs in fall 1999. Indiana University at Bloomington, Syracuse University, and the Universities of Michigan and Virginia have been selected to participate in the accrediting body's yearlong pilot program.