Summary
Should the Obama Administration require all schools of education to be accredited?
As it stands now, schools of education are free to seek accreditation at their own bidding. Most universities and colleges in the United States are accreditedand almost half of accreditation education programs are accredited by the National Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE). Accreditation agencies are privately owned, for-profit organizations that create their own standards to implement in education schools. The assumed purpose for accrediting teacher programs is so that our nation can be assured that teachers have received degrees from a reputable school. The other stipulation for attending an accredited college is that without accreditation, students are not eligible for federal aid. These reasons all are seem to point towards the neccessity of accreditation, but in a time when our nation is looking to reform education, apparent necessity is only the shallow measure of a program’s worth. The illusion of quality that comes with education is simply that, an illusion. It does not measure student learning. If the accreditation process does not improve the quality of an education institute and the teachers it produces, than it is a worthless system, regardless of all the strings attached. The fact that most programs are accredited and our schools are in poor condition, with much of the blame placed upon teachers, goes to show that the current system of accredition will not be the saving grace for public schools. There has been no evidence produced that show that accreditated schools certify superior teachers in contrast to non-accredited education programs. President Obama’s educational advisor, Linda Darling-Hammond, stresses that we should be looking to value-added when evaluating whether our current assessment systems are improving student education. This alone should cause our nation to re-evaluate the accreditation system.
NCATE is the most used accrediting agency and is the model for which accreditation is defined. Their process of accrediting is known to be rigorous and over-whelming. They are also known for their standards. Not only does NCATE hold the accredition of a school in the balance based on their adherence to these standards, professors are to evaluate each student based on their conformance to each standard. Students in education schools have been kicked out of the program because their professor did not find the student to possess one of the “dispositions” NCATE’s standards require a teacher to carry. There have been much controversy over one particular disposition that NCATE may or may not, depending on who you ask, have required their institutions to add to their standards. This term is “social justice.” The uproar is that NCATE accredited institutions were using social justice as their way of expressing political views and judging faculty and students based on their beliefs. Once this term was “removed” from NCATE’s standard, a whole new opposing public emerged, furious for the elimination of the term. The real issue here is how vague the NCATE’s standards are and how much interpretation is required to understand them. Not only does this provide inconsistencies in the ways that teaching schools implement the standards, it also provides inconsistent evaluation by NCATE itself. The number of schools accredited is inconsistent throughout the years. Some years not one teaching program is denied accreditation, while other years several schools are turned down. The other conclusion that could be drawn from this anomaly is that a profitable organization may be making decisions based upon its wallet. Most schools that fail to pass NCATE’s standards after already receiving initial accreditation are not stripped entirely of their accreditation but instead put on probation. This means that they will still be paying NCATE annual dues.
When our economy is down, and the cost of education is rising, the accreditation fees are still on the up-and-up. The cost of accrediting a school is immense, and when funds for education are stretched thin, not only do schools of education lack the funds to pay accreditors, the dues will be trickled to the students, adding to their mountain of fees attached to seeking higher education.
Not every institution of education is alike, but every accredited school is given the same set of standards. Although the concept of education schools have a centralized starting point is pleasant, reshaping the mission and ideals of a school to fit a standards created by an outside organization seems to be a step in the wrong direction. Teachers should be shaped by multiple avenues of thought, and expecting every teacher, at every college to possess identical dispositions and philosophies is too standardized and far from innovative. Private institutions and smaller colleges struggle with becoming accredited because the standards are not flexible based on the size of a program, and materializing the inputs created for a larger school is a hard feat to accomplish.
There has been a call for a national assessment and standards of education, and Obama is behind this initiative full throttle. He appears to find that requiring all schools of education to be accredited will solve this, but it actuality goes against ideas for updating processes of assessment. Accreditation is input based, meaning that schools are evaluated on a “checklist” system to assure that they have all the proper elements that make up a sufficient institution. The only way to assure, however, that students are progressing and performing well is to evaluate their outputs by observing them in the classroom setting.
New innovative ideas and projects are beginning to emerge that could revolutionize teacher education and open a door for new, more accurate ways to assess it. Organizations and academic research have begun to explore the idea of a teacher-mentor system, and teacher-practice as a means to replace a bulk of the classroom-lecture environment. All of these methods will allow schools to measure their students throughout their education, and hopefully avoid placing inadequate teachers in classrooms before ever seeing their performance. Obama has aspired to reform education by reshaping teacher. He cannot do that and expect the current system of accreditation to evaluate it objectively or successfully.
