The Politics of Accountability Teacher E (1)

Educational Policy
27(2) 190 –216
© The Author(s) 2013
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DOI: 10.1177/0895904812472725
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472725EPX27210.1177/0895904812472725Educational PolicyLewis and Young
© The Author(s) 2013
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1University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY, USA
2North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC, USA
Corresponding Author:
Wayne D. Lewis, University of Kentucky, 134B Taylor Education Building, Lexington, KY 40506-
0017, USA.
Email: [e-mail]
The Politics of
Accountability: Teacher
Education Policy
Wayne D. Lewis1 and Tamara V. Young2
Abstract
Drawing on Kingdon’s multiple streams framework, this study examines how
teacher education policy has gained prominence on the federal decision
agenda in recent years.
Keywords
accountability, policy, policy formation, politics of education, teacher certification/
licensure, teacher education, teacher preparation, teacher quality
The political debate surrounding teacher quality and the effectiveness of teacher
education programs has reached new heights over the past two decades
(Cochran-Smith, 2005; Cochran-Smith & Fries, 2001; Weiner, 2000; Wiseman,
2012). The current debate, however, is not a new one. Rather, it is an extension
of an ongoing national policy debate about teacher education policy that has
existed since the 1960s when the federal government began to closely examine
whether federal funds for public endeavors were producing desired outcomes
(Rossi, Lipsey, & Freeman, 2004) and scholars began to study whether teachers
impact student learning, and if so, how (Arnold, Denemark, Nelli, Robinson, &
Sagan, 1977), with answers to these questions varying (e.g., Coleman et al.,
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Lewis and Young 191
1966; Jencks, Smith, Acland, & Bane, 1972). Since that time, the empirical
literature has grown exponentially, with it by and large converging on the con-
clusion that teachers do matter. However, conflict remains around how teachers
matter and what type of preparation for teachers is likely to contribute to their
effectiveness. For example, although some research has shown that on average,
preparedness, effectiveness, and retention are higher for new teachers who
have completed preservice programs than for new teachers who received less
preparation prior to entering the classroom (Boyd, Grossman, Lankford, Loeb,
& Wyckoff, 2006, 2008; Clotfelter, Ladd, & Vigdor, 2007; Darling-Hammond,
2006; Darling-Hammond, Holtzman, Gatlin, & Helig, 2005), other studies
have concluded that preservice teacher education programs matter little, if any,
to how effective a teacher is in the classroom (Ballou & Podgursky, 2000;
Kane, Rockoff, & Staiger, 2008; Walsh, 2001).
With significant advances in understanding the importance of teacher
quality, there have been several policy initiatives, such as the Carnegie Task
Force on Teaching as a Profession and the founding of the National Board for
Professional Teaching Standards that have attended to the inputs and pro-
cesses of teacher education (e.g., recruitment, selection, retention; the con-
tent, experiences, and requirements of preservice preparation programs;
accreditation and certification; mentoring new teachers; and continuing pro-
fessional development). There has also been a focus on student outcomes,
specifically, student achievement as a primary indicator of teacher effective-
ness. However, over the past decade the focus on outcomes has intensified, as
evident by calls for and, in some instances, the systems where teachers are
evaluated on the basis of student outcomes.
This focus on holding teachers accountable for outcomes, accompanied
by the plethora of research on teacher education and modern advances in
technology facilitating the ability to gather, store, analyze, and link student
data across P-20 educational settings and beyond, has brought about
increased interest in assessing the effectiveness of teacher education pro-
grams based on outcomes as well. Approaches to outcomes-based account-
ability for teacher preparation programs have fallen into one of four main
categories: (a) evaluation based on the achievement scores of students taught
by program graduates, (b) evaluation based on teacher candidates’ demon-
stration of research-supported teaching behaviors, (c) evaluation of teacher
candidates during their preparation period based on how students perform in
response to their teaching, and (d) evaluation based on how students perform
in response to programs graduates’ teaching during graduates’ early years of
teaching (Cochran-Smith & Powers, 2010). Different forms of accountabil-
ity models for teacher preparation programs now exist in several states,
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192 Educational Policy 27(2)
including Texas, Florida, and Ohio. Darling-Hammond (2010) remarked of
this heightened attention to teacher preparation:
For teacher education, this is perhaps the best of times and the worst
of times. It may be the best of times because so much hard work has
been done by many teacher educators over the past two decades to
develop more successful program models and because we have just
elected a president of the United States who has a strong commitment
to the improvement of teaching. It may equally be the worst of times
because there are so many forces in the environment that conspire to
undermine these efforts. (p. 35)
Some argue that forces that Darling-Hammond references are motivated by
politics rather than authentic concern for improving teacher effectiveness.
Cochran-Smith and Fries (2001), for example, have characterized the current
national debate as being embedded within two overlapping, simultaneously
competing, and even at times contradictory larger national agendas: “The
agenda to professionalize teaching and teacher education, which is linked to
the K-12 standards movement” . . . [and] “the movement to deregulate
teacher preparation, which aims to dismantle teacher education institutions
and break up the monopoly of the profession” (p. 3). This professionalism–
deregulation debate, or P-D debate as termed by Fenstermacher (2002), has
been carried out through scholarly writing and research, the media, local
boards of education, state legislatures, Congress, and the U.S. Department of
Education.
Interestingly, this keen focus on the effectiveness of teacher education was
forecasted decades earlier by Arnold et al. (1977), who remarked,
Public demands for accountability, combined with the awakened
interests of teachers and the press upon school systems and colleges
for better utilization of resources, will continue and expand the
already significant development of personnel development centers or
other collaborative mechanisms for improving the education of
teachers. (p. 78)
This study examines the extent to which the factors that Cochran-Smith
and Fries (2001) highlighted a decade ago and Arnold et al. (1977) pointed
out more 35 years ago are transpiring in our contemporary. Using Kingdon’s
(1984) multiple-streams model, this study examines the political dimension
of teacher education accountability policy, with specific attention to the
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Lewis and Young 193
policy formation of teacher education accountability initiatives formulated in
the past few years. This study is important because “if we do not fully con-
sider the political dimension, the ways we think about teacher education will
be partial and distorted, and our efforts to intervene in the policy and practice
of teacher education will be less effective and salutary” (Ginsberg & Lindsay,
1995, p. 4). To situate our analysis, the next section of the article provides an
overview of federal involvement with teacher education and describes the
theoretical framework guiding our analysis.
Federal Government Involvement With Teacher
Education and Teacher Quality
The federal government’s interest in teacher education and teacher quality
began in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but this early involvement
was largely limited to financial support for teacher professional development
in targeted areas and in response to identified areas of national importance
and perceived national crises (Cohen-Vogel, 2005; Earley, 2000). As illus-
trated by federal attention to teacher quality and training after the launch of
Sputnik, during the cold war, and following the release of the Reagan admin-
istration’s A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform, teacher
education and teacher quality began to make routine appearances on the
federal policy agenda beginning in the latter half of the 20th century (Cohen-
Vogel, 2005; Earley, 2000). The circulation of education reform documents
during the 1980s, like A Nation at Risk, set the stage for reform conversations
and federal policy response to come in the following decades. During those
years, education leaders, including leaders of national associations of col-
leges of teacher education, began to endorse the adoption of a systemic
education reform agenda and national standards, and as pressure increased
for students to be held accountable to world-class, uniform, national stan-
dards, so did the pressure increase for holding teachers and teacher education
programs accountable for student outcomes (Weiner, 2000). That type of
pressure in part led to the eventual reauthorization of the Higher Education
Act (HEA) with significantly strengthened accountability provisions for
teacher education programs.
National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future (NCTAF) 1996
report made bold recommendations for increased scrutiny of teacher educa-
tion programs (National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future,
1996). The report proposed that by 2006 every student would be provided
with “what should be his or her educational birthright: access to competent,
caring, qualified teaching in schools organized for success” (p. 10). As
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194 Educational Policy 27(2)
evidenced by their subsequent policy response in the reauthorization of the
HEA in 1998, federal policy makers gleaned five key messages from that
report:
(a) more people must be recruited into teaching,
(b) teachers are not well prepared in the subjects they are expected to
teach,
(c) teacher education is disconnected from the needs of K-12 schools
and from collegiate arts and sciences units,
(d) the regulation of teacher preparation and licensure works against
teacher quality, and
(e) presidents of institutions of higher education with teacher education
programs pay little attention to these units. (Earley, 2000, p. 30)
Ideas about the revision of the teacher education provision of HEA to
address issues raised in the NCTAF report emerged not only from Congress
but also from education organizations and the U.S. Department of Education.
Although the details of proposals for improving teacher education varied
considerably, there was an apparent agreement on two points: (a) the recruit-
ment of teachers should be addressed, and (b) support for colleges of teacher
education should be linked to their partnership with K-12 schools (Earley,
2000). The teacher education provisions of the HEA that resulted proved to
be quite controversial, with Congress showing a willingness to “intervene in
the affairs of institutions of higher education as never before” (Cohen-Vogel,
2005, p. 31) to improve teacher quality.
A new Title II of the HEA to address teacher education was divided into a
section for categorical programs for partnerships and states, and a section for
mandatory accountability requirements for states and institutions of higher
education. The whole of Title II accomplished three general aims; it (a)
authorized programs to recruit persons into the teaching profession, (b) sup-
ported partnership arrangements between higher education institutions and
K-12 schools for teacher preparation, and (c) gathered data on the teacher
education system as a way of holding the system accountable for the quality
of teachers entering the profession (Earley, 2000).
Specifically, Title II required states and colleges of teacher education receiv-
ing federal funds either directly or indirectly through HEA to provide the U.S.
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