EdFix Episode 12: Why Accreditation Matters

TRANSCRIPT

CHRIS KOCH:
There's great benefit to asking questions, collecting evidence, which raises further questions, which gives you further insights, as part of a continuous improvement effort.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
I'm Michael Feuer, and this is EdFix, your source for insights about the practice and promise of education. We're very fortunate this morning that Dr. Chris Koch has stopped by here at "Studio T." Chris is the president of something called the Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation, or CAEP, which he has been leading since the fall of 2015. It is one of the mechanisms that we have invented in this country to advance equity and excellence in education generally, and in particular, in the preparation of educators. In addition to being a distinguished alumnus of the graduate school of education and human development, he also served as the state superintendent of education in Illinois, 2006 until 2015. Welcome.

CHRIS KOCH:
Thank you. It's great to be here.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
It's great to have you with us. CAEP is such an interesting, relatively new invention in the field of education quality. Say a little bit about what's happening there.

CHRIS KOCH:
Sure. Thank you, and thanks for the opportunity to be here. So, CAEP came about from the merger of two prior accreditors, National Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education and the Teacher Education Accreditation Council or something along those lines, I believe. So those two former accreditors had come together and decided a single accreditor for the nation for teacher and educator preparation was a good idea, so came up with five guiding standards and principles for CAEP, and that happened in 2013. I came on board in 2015 to try to make that vision of a single accreditor possible.

CHRIS KOCH:
The main and important features for folks to remember about accreditation and what is accreditation to accomplish, it is continuous improvement for the provider and public accountability. They marry those two purposes in accreditation, and in the end, what I like to see or hear from providers who've gone through accreditation is that, "This was a rigorous process, but it had value. It helped us to focus around key goals of improvement that we needed to do anyway, and it was fair, and gave us good insights into that." That's what we strive to do.

CHRIS KOCH:
I remember the board talking at the time that the standards were coming into play, and there were many comparisons to other professions, the medical profession, "Would you ever go to a school, seek to be a doctor, if the institution wasn't nationally accredited? Would you ever go into a law school, would you ever go into an engineering school? Why is it different for teacher prep?" So, the vision for accreditation and a single national accreditor was that.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
When you say providers, that, I guess, means schools of education, but not just schools of education.

CHRIS KOCH:
Correct. The landscape's changing somewhat, and we have a whole venue of folks who are grouped as alternative providers, in addition to all traditional providers of teacher administrator preparation. So it's wider, a lot more online or hybrids of online programs, and a lot more creativity into where and how educators can be prepared. And what we hold common to all those are five standards, the first being a very solid knowledge of the discipline and pedagogy, the second being clinical experience, the third, which is around selectivity and recruitment, the fourth, which is somewhat controversial among many, is making a connection to a K-12 student's performance and showing impact on that in a positive way, and the fifth, and perhaps most important, is continuous improvement.

CHRIS KOCH:
What is the provider's ability to systematically use information that they gather about their program, and evidence for that, to get better? And have they made that routine and systematic? Just as we tried to do many years in this country for K-12 schools, similar way. We wanted them to constantly be thinking about how to improve, and often, even in a state like Illinois, where we had many school districts, there was a great deal of variance among some who were on a trajectory of vast improvement and a solid many who were sort of stable, and then some going in the opposite direction. We needed some means to differentiate that through evidence.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
Ballpark estimate, how many, for example, universities or colleges around the country are preparing teachers for work in K-12?

CHRIS KOCH:
Well, many more than we accredit. If we had, at our peak, 900, there would be at least twice of that, and many states having many providers and emerging providers, some of which they're grasping to get control of, so we really are, at best, looking at maybe half the folks coming through accreditation process.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
So as a rough estimate, a couple of thousand different places and ways-

CHRIS KOCH:
Quite possible, yes.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
... in which educators are being prepared, but then, the business of accreditation is actually a voluntary act, or is there a mandate in different places that requires them to do this?

CHRIS KOCH:
That's a fantastic question. In some states, accreditation is required. If it's required, it is done so by the states, because we have this thing called state sovereignty in this national union that we live in, and among our 34 agreements that we have, about 13, 14 of them require accreditation in some form. Some states adopted our standards. Some want us just to do it for them. They'll take the information and use it for their own state processes. Often, this has to be manifest in state regulations or laws, so we have partnerships with the states in which we work, not all of them, and a provider in a state that doesn't have a relationship with CAEP can still seek accreditation. They would just do that on their own.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
The accreditation thing serves some kind of a quality control function. Is that part of the philosophy in educational accreditation also?

CHRIS KOCH:
It absolutely is. I mean, the public accountability and protection of candidates who are seeking and spending this money to become something is part of the role of accreditation. We're recognized by the Council for Higher Ed Accreditation. That's one of the things that we have to demonstrate to them, through our own recognition, that we're able to do. We actually have had, even with these new CAEP standards, students write to us, and former students write to us, saying, "Thank you for looking at this program. I haven't been able to get a job since I graduated," and we have letters like that. So that's part of our role, and it's an important role.

CHRIS KOCH:
Also, it's not just important that we look at this as would you go to a school that is accredited? Would you ever got to a medical school and get a doctorate in medicine, and try to practice, without accreditation, but you as a patient, would you want to go to a doctor who had come from such a program, and get treatment? The answer for most people would be no, but why do we feel differently around a teacher, or sending our students into teachers? Is it so much that we need them and there's such a shortage that we're willing to tolerate a greater threshold of, "They seem to be an adult in the classroom with my children," versus an adult who is well trained in knowing how to intervene on behalf of students' learning.

CHRIS KOCH:
And I think our outcomes in this country demonstrate that we've got a problem there, because we've got almost a quarter of people graduating from high school with illiteracy, or not being able to read at grade level. That's a staggering statistic for a country like the United States. It's one in which CAEP is in part wanting to do something about in a small part, in saying, "Standards matter. Preparation matters," and if we're not reaching kids, and I saw this, Michael, as a superintendent, school districts that were not doing their local role, in whatever democratic accountability you call a local school district, where kids were bereft of any administrators or teachers for where they could get a basic education. There were districts that's that's happening all over this country, and thousands of kids every day are impacted by that.

CHRIS KOCH:
If children aren't reading, as you well know, by the third grade, they're going to run into trouble, and we have too many school districts and too many places in this country where that's still the case. That's not only because, of course, as you know, of teacher prep, but teacher preparation matters, and I know that from my own experience as a teacher, and how difficult it is to go into a classroom of high school kids who aren't reading at grade level, some of whom are reading below the third grade level, and how do you address that problem? That's a real situation that teachers are encountering in this country.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
This business of connecting what goes on in a provider to the long-term success of students in classrooms who are being taught by teachers who were trained in these providing institutions. How does one make those sort of inferences, and what kind of data would you use?

CHRIS KOCH:
We've got some states that are trying to be more proactive, and part of what we do at CAEP, through state agreements, is we try to leverage relationships between the states and the preparation institutions, and some states, frankly, that's not very good. So, we want those relationships to happen. I had to work at those relationships in Illinois, and I wasn't good at it initially. I had to learn, from meeting with deans, and meeting with prep institutions, and meeting with president's, about their work, the way that K-12 policy impacted that and influenced that.

CHRIS KOCH:
And when we had this emergence of money for longitudinal data systems and different infrastructure that states could put in play, there was a lot of hope that higher ed would also benefit from that. In fact, I never spoke to a preparation institution that did not want to know how their candidates were doing on the job. They would say, instead, "What are ways in which we can gather information about that? Can the state help us?" We get that question a lot. In some states, the answer is yes. In other states, the answer is it's forming, and we can do this much but not enough. In other states, it's not there.

CHRIS KOCH:
So, we have to have, and collect, and accept a wide variety of evidence to demonstrate for those standards to be met, but we are looking, and we do judge that the assessments are valid and reliable and that these are objective measures and not just something that someone says without some sort of evidence. But there's great promise, and I think movement, because what we see, just as we saw in K-12 schools in this country, is that when people start using information or data, even if it's a little, it elicits other secondary or tertiary questions that they weren't asking before. So, you have to start somewhere, and you've got to start with what you have.

CHRIS KOCH:
Otherwise, you won't move forward, and we will be accused of being stagnant and not improving. And to an institution or to a program, that has been demonstrated, that there's great benefit to asking questions, collecting evidence, which raises further questions, which gives you further insights, and next year, we're going to learn this, and we're going to target this. That's a wonderful thing to see as part of a continuous improvement effort.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
Are there tensions between those purposes of accreditation, accountability and continuous improvement?

CHRIS KOCH:
Oh, without a doubt. It's constant tension, and a balancing act, and it's always been the case that if you're seen as a regulator, or someone that's passing judgment, that you're going to be open to criticism, including the ways in which you're doing it, what you're asking for, and your methods, and that's okay. And in fact, we're not a regulator. We're not federal. We're voluntary unless the state requires it, so that's one response to that. But if not this, then what, for continuous improvement that marries accountability?

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
In this tension that you've described between accreditation for accountability and accreditation for improvement, who's winning that right now? On this see-saw, who's up and who's down?

CHRIS KOCH:
It's hard to answer. I would say the accountability measures are going down right now, in terms of popularity, perhaps passing the race to the top era funding and the data systems, and I think also, in part because of the misuse of accountability. We saw that with certainly K-12 education, and having single measures of improvement, or states trying to achieve metrics that were not really thoughtful without a full understanding, really, of assessment, the limitations of assessment, or the notion of multiple measures. That's evolved, perhaps, I hope, towards more thoughtful and responsible accountability, married with what I describe, really, the most important goal is continuous improvement of accreditation.

CHRIS KOCH:
It doesn't do any good if you do accreditation certainly for a checklist or to get through it, without walking away with some sort of systemic understanding of what you can continue to do when we're not there. We do hand a report in, but the point is have you put structures in place and systems in place that cause you to reflect so that you'll get better on your own, whether we were there or not, is a better outcome.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
There are all kinds of ways that one could imagine evaluating the quality of what goes on in teacher preparation and then providing a kind of evidence to guide improvement. What else do we currently rely on in order to give schools of education or other providers some kind of useful information?

CHRIS KOCH:
There's a self-study process initially, that lays out... That's where they're documenting what we're doing, so, "If these are the standards, here's what we're doing, for good or bad. This is the evidence that we have at this point in time of where we are in the process," and I think every accreditor does something similar. Our process is two years, so they'll do that. Nine months later, we're sending out a team to verify, et cetera. There's a back-and-forth. There are many times for correction. But not everybody can do it in the same way. Some folks say, "Well, this costs a lot of money." Any time that you're collecting evidence and using it, that's not free. We see a variety. We see folks still... I mean, we see people doing case studies. We see people using objective measures and standardized instruments. We see folks doing all sorts of follow-up surveys, and very creative means of people engaging again with folks who went through the program. Some programs keep ties to their students, and they look at that as professional development once they're in classrooms.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
So the places that are voluntarily signing up to be accredited end up facing the stimulus to do other things in the spirit of continuous improvement, that they might not otherwise have thought of-

CHRIS KOCH:
They may not have.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
... in quite the same way. Yeah.

CHRIS KOCH:
We think that makes them more competitive. We think that makes them better at their work, and we think in the long run, that's going to add value to their entire institution. Not just their program, but that it does matter in terms of the quality, when you're doing that type of thing, which I will add, CAEP also does. We're constantly being reviewed by the Council for Higher Ed Accreditation around a set of standards that we're providing evidence for on a continual basis. We think that also has value.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
So here, the accreditors are being held accountable.

CHRIS KOCH:
We're also being held accountable. We can also lose recognition as an accreditor, and we think that's important to have, to go through, and in addition to our board, in addition to the evaluation that we do for every single accreditation process, we're collecting information. We have a research committee on our board that is asking questions around the standards themselves. We're using the evidence that we gather to ask further questions about are these the best standards? Are there other components here we should include? You know, what has been most successful in the field? Because we want to also tell institutions, as part of being in this accreditation club, we're going to show you what we think are exemplars around the demonstration of these standards.

CHRIS KOCH:
We're going to provide that information as part of a service, also, to states, and so that states can be thinking about... We have states that come in and watch our processes, sit through the trainings, and go back and try to mimic that, and that's fine. We've also, where there are holes, we've tried to fill in. Elementary standards for teaching is one such area where CAEP has developed standards that we feel better reflect the needs of the field. We did that with all the other specialized professional associations, in saying that math, social studies, reading, and science are also important to elementary preparation. In my state, former state, we surveyed elementary teachers who told us that they were going into elementary teaching because they weren't good in math and science. We have to change those kinds of mindsets, and we do that through, in part, standards and standing by them, and using them in processes that are useful.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
Say something about how you got into this business.

CHRIS KOCH:
I grew up on a farm in West Sorento, Illinois, had five siblings, and a dairy, which means, for folks out there who ever have any exposure to a dairy farm, it means 365 days a year, twice a day, and my mother had gone back to school after raising six kids, finished her bachelor's, got a master's, became a dietician, and I remember sitting in the kitchen table at night, studying microbiology and all sorts of things that I thought, "Wow. So there's a value of education."

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
And she did this after-

CHRIS KOCH:
She did it after raising-

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
... the kids... after raising the-

CHRIS KOCH:
Sure, after raising six kids, and she always had the ability to look at the strengths of people and build on those, or to look at potential. And I think that gave me an interest in working with people who needed help. I started at my undergrad of working with students with learning disabilities. In helping them, I became trained as a diagnostician, and then was helping them through a program at Southern Illinois University, where this program was, where students were coming in without any thought if they could ever make it through college, and they did. And they only had learning differently. So, we helped diagnose, we helped work with faculty, we helped at the institution itself, for them to be able to be successful. Then I'd gone into working with kids right out of college, who were in trouble, and there were a lot of them out there-

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
Working with kids in schools?

CHRIS KOCH:
Initially an Outward Bound program in New Hampshire was my first out-of-college job, where actually, I'd come to GW from there, because I was working with kids who had so many needs, and I came here and said, "I am not nearly prepared to work with the multiple needs that these young people have," who were in trouble with the law and everything else. And I would be going to court with them, and then going on wilderness expeditions with them, being their parent, cooking their meals on the weekend, and many of them, undiagnosed needs of all sorts. My student teaching experience was in a youth detention center, again where I encountered so many kids who had had learning differences, undiagnosed, who are just in terrible trouble, and not with a bright future. So that was my start into sort of exposure with children, and with education, and in trying to find an interest in doing that and getting better at doing it, so that you could help young people.

CHRIS KOCH:
One of my first teaching experiences was actually here in DC, at a psychiatric hospital day school, so we had inpatients and we had kids in the day school. Then, a really nice team effort, from mental health as well as academics, in helping these young people and trying to get them on the right road. Did that for several years. Had a stint at the US Department of Ed in working in correctional education and Dr-

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
Correctional education?

CHRIS KOCH:
Correctional education, and Dr. Gail Schwartz was here at the time, working with incarcerated and detained young people, and trying to help them, because so many people, Michael as you well know, of folks who encounter the correctional system, have learning problems or undiagnosed learning problems, and that was, at one time, a program here at GW, and that's actually how I first found GW, and Dr. Schwartz brought me in and saw that I needed a lot of work probably, and enjoying that very much and trying to use it then in the classroom. And I'd gone back to Illinois at one point, between the master's and doctorate, and came back and finished the doctorate here.

CHRIS KOCH:
Every single thread of experience and training that you have is important in policy work, and particularly when you're getting into policy work as a state superintendent. I was a director of special ed for a state before that. There's just, in a state as large as Illinois, thousands and thousands of issues that come up that require you to know and utilize other expertise and bring that to the fold so that the public is served from a public position, and I think that was what compelled me to go into, then, the public policy work.

CHRIS KOCH:
And you don't start out saying, "Oh, I think I want to be a superintendent when I grow up." This isn't how it happens, but you're in there doing the work, and trying to make sure that the public is well served, and I think the preparation here was incredibly helpful to that end, without question, both when I was doing classroom work and then as that evolved into policy work in the public venue.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
Is there still a kind of risk of a return to the diffusion of this whole accrediting thing? What's happening there?

CHRIS KOCH:
There is, and there's efforts out there to come up with other models, and I think now a Department of Ed that says, "You know, hey, competition's a good thing," so different viewpoints. And I think a fear from a lot of folks out there preparing teachers to say, "Well, if CAEP is consequential, if there's a chance I'm going to be put on probation, I don't want to take it." In fact, we've had people write to us and tell us that. We've also had people write to us, and institutions, and say, "It's not our job to worry about how students are raising achievement once they leave. Our-"

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
This is partly why some states mandate the accreditation? It's exactly to-

CHRIS KOCH:
It's partly why some states will say-

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
... prevent that sort of behavior?

CHRIS KOCH:
... "We don't want that behavior, is we were mandating it because we needed to do it." And understanding that states are complex political systems who are also being influenced by all these same types of things. Then you add to that turnover, in both political and leadership positions, and it is a constant job to try to inform people about why something's important and why it should be continued. But that was very true in my role as state superintendent, and in any role where you have to sort of navigate those waters.

CHRIS KOCH:
The best way to do that is to keep your eye on the prize of having a really solid service and product, which is here, the accreditation process, and making sure people know about it, and making sure people know that it's fair and that it's worthwhile. We try to do that in a number of ways. After folks go through, we have a CAEP Voices, where we'll interview faculty and deans who have gone through it, who talk about it. We try to make sure we're bringing the exemplar information up, and we're researching what we do. That's going to take time, and sometimes people are open to that, and sometimes they're not. But if they're not now, they may be in two years. So you sort of have to keep your eye on doing the best job that you can through those turbulent waters, knowing that hopefully in the end, people will go and require or know that this is something of value.

CHRIS KOCH:
If we can get teachers, or people, interested in education and administrators who want to be administrators asking questions about, "What does it mean to be of quality, and why should I pick this one?" then we're somewhat successful. And those questions are being asked, and you've got to also focus on those successes in order to achieve, "I'm coming to work every day, and this makes a difference," because in the end, it really does make a difference. There are thousands of kids I saw, in school districts where we could have not intervened but did, that are getting a much higher quality of education and are able to have the chance to do something afterwards, after they finish school, in public education, and that's a terrific, terrific achievement, to know that they can be influenced, and a single teacher, as you know, or administrator, has a lot of bandwidth for impacting that.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
You know, we refer to this podcast, our EdFix, as a source on the practice and promise of education, and you've just done something very lovely, which is find a way to wrap up our conversation with some optimism, and it's an optimism that I sense is based on your real experience, your knowledge, and your day-to-day interaction. I think it's important for anybody involved in education to feel that there is promise, and that we can be doing this stuff better. Not to put too fine a point on it, but with you in charge, this is the CAEP of good hope.

CHRIS KOCH:
Nicely said. Thank you.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
EdFix is produced, directed, and edited by the great Touran Waters, here at GW. People who enjoyed this conversation can subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Player FM, or wherever you listen to your podcasts, and we have a lovely website where you can get more information about this, edfixpodcast.com. Chris Koch, the President of the Council for Accreditation of Educator Preparation. I love being in the presence of some president's. Thank you so much.

CHRIS KOCH:
Thank you for the opportunity. It's been a pleasure.

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