Obama Dept. of Ed. Imposes Dangerous Rules to Evaluate Colleges of Education
The Obama Department of Education has less than three months left to impose its test-obsessed, accountability-driven agenda for school reform. To cap its record of technocratic policy, the Department of Education just published final regulations requiring states to evaluate and rate teacher education programs—whether traditional college-based programs or shorter alternative programs like the five-week summer training for Teach for America. The new regulations are Arne Duncan’s project. Draft rules were distributed for feedback in 2014, and John King has filled the position of Secretary of Education for less than a year.
Here is how Inside Higher Education describes the final rules: “The new rules require reporting of program-level data on graduates’ job placement and retention, consistent with what the Obama administration is doing in other aspects of higher education; feedback from graduates and their employers; and learning outcomes of students taught by graduates of prep programs. The final rules give significant flexibility to states to determine the specific measures used to gauge student learning outcomes.”
Emma Brown of the Washington Post explains further the controversial idea that programs to train teachers will be judged by the achievement of the students eventually taught by a program’s graduates: “In the regulations, the Education Department still requires states to judge teacher training programs based on whether students are learning. But the new regulations leave it up to states to decide how to measure student learning and how much that variable should count toward an overall rating… States must rate programs ‘low–performing,’ ‘at-risk,’ or ‘effective’; those rated less than effective for two out of any three years will be stripped of their eligibility for federal Teacher Education Assistance for College and Higher Education, or TEACH, grants—up to $4,000 a year for aspiring teachers who commit to working in high-needs schools after graduation.”
Stiffening evaluation of colleges of education has been part and parcel of the teacher-blaming strategy of No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top—federal programs that have demanded ever rising scores on standardized tests without addressing poverty, segregation, and unequal Obama Dept. of Ed. Imposes Dangerous Rules to Evaluate Colleges of Education | janresseger:
