After placing the College of Education’s accreditation under scrutiny two and a half years ago, the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education will decide whether to keep the school fully accredited or remove its credentials by the end of the month, said a leader of the council team who recently evaluated the college.
The NCATE board that grants school accreditations will consider the College of Education’s status during meetings from Oct. 19 to Oct. 23, said B. Grant Hayes, co-chairman of the team that visited the college last month.
During the visit, the team verified that the school had made the improvements the council mandated when it placed the school on “accreditation with conditions” in spring 2005, said Starlin Weaver, the team’s other chairman. After the visit, the five-person team recommended that the school be taken off probation, Weaver said.
“We did find everything in order,” Weaver said.
The council board that grants school accreditations generally adheres to recommendations made by visiting teams, Weaver said.
If the college’s accreditation were stripped, it would cease to receive state and federal funding. Students of the college would also be unable to receive federal and state financial aid.
An unaccredited school is also unable to certify its students, giving it little practical function, said Donna Wiseman, the College of Education’s interim dean.
The college was placed on conditional accreditation after it failed to meet one of the six standards required for any school that certifies public school teachers. That standard said that colleges should have school-wide systems for statistically assessing student performance.
The school failed the standard because statistics such as student grades, standardized test scores and internship evaluations were being analyzed within specific College of Education programs but not across the college, said Assistant Dean Kathy Angeletti.
“We were collecting lots of student data at the program level,” Angeletti said. “However, the board wanted to see documentation that the program faculty looked at program evaluation and candidate performance data across the college to initiate changes for program improvement.”
Since its accreditation was called into question, the school has spent “thousands of hours” working to revise its system for analyzing student assessments, Angeletti said. The system the school finally created combines data specific to each of its programs to allow for a college-wide analysis of performance trends, she said.
The college has benefited from updating its assessment system, Wiseman said. This year, through the new system, the college discovered that students in all of its programs wanted more practice communicating with parents and using technology in the classroom.
The updated system also allows the college to evaluate student interns to see that they are meeting standards, Wiseman said. The school’s administrators had considered implementing these performance-based assessments before the school was placed on probation but were forced to introduce them under NCATE’s stipulations, she said.
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