Why the New Teacher Ed. Standards Matter

Ed Week

For some time, the central challenge of teacher preparation has been ensuring that new educators are prepared to help the nation’s increasingly diverse students meet increasingly complex expectations—in school, and then in college and careers. But only recently have preparation programs begun focusing their attention on those who have the biggest stake in a pipeline of effective educators: the nation’s students.

That shift in focus represents a sea change in preparing the nation’s teacher workforce. New standards for accrediting teacher-preparation programs—put together by the Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation and approved in late August by CAEP’s board, on which we both sit—will move providers from a process-oriented system of accountability to one that measures improvement against desired student outcomes, from inclusive to highly selective admissions, and from theoretical, academic preparation to an emphasis on pedagogy and clinical practice learned from hands-on experience in schools.

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