Over the past week, different groups are maneuvering around the writing of regulations for Title II of the Higher Education Act, which focuses on teacher education. Education Week has been covering the lobbying that’s developed after the breakdown of attempted stakeholder negotiations over the regulations, with articles last Wednesday on a coalition of higher-education organizations ((Disclosure: My institution is a member of several of those organizations–AACTE, ACE, and APLU. This post represents my observations as an individual faculty member and neither my department, college, nor university.)) and yesterday with reporting on a letter to the U.S. Department of Education by several groups such as Democrats for Education Reform. DFER and the other signatories are usually more closely associated with K-12 policy debates than higher ed.
At one level, the debate is over the extent to which states should track the way that graduates and other completers of teacher education programs have an influence on their students. Both coalitions emphasize the need to have higher expectations for teacher-education programs. As expected, DFER et al. have an extraordinarily optimistic view of the capacity to make connections to the outcomes of K-12 students taught by program completers, and the higher-ed group statement could be read by a distrusting member of another group as a wait-until-everything-is-proven argument.
The obvious solution to me is to require pilot programs in each state to see exactly what the capacity is to do this type of analysis responsibly in each state, with some safeguards on the quality of the work and preventing double-standards as well as a way to examine program quality where there is no student-outcome data. I can think of one way to make sure that pilots are taken seriously by the larger teacher-education programs in a state, but the primary barrier to having pilot programs that can expand in a flexible regulatory structure is not the fact I was out of the room during the negotiated rulemaking phase. Instead, the primary barrier is the difficulty in revising federal regulations. There are extensive blocks to writing regulations quickly, for all sorts of reasonable historical reasons as well as unreasonable ones, and an agency that fails to dot its is and cross its ts will find itself in court and possibly starting from scratch. A slow regulation-writing structure also means that revising regulations is fraught with procedural minefields. And thus, no way to adjust regulatory regimes rapidly based on pilots. So DFER et al. try to bite off as much as they can right now, and the big higher-ed groups maneuver widdershins around the DFER et al. coalition.