JRCoE Receives CAEP accreditation

The Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation announced that the Jeannine Rainbolt College of Education is one of 59 providers from 24 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico to receive accreditation for their educator preparation programs. The fall 2019 review by the CAEP Accreditation Council resulted in 59 newly accredited EPPs, bringing the total to 281 providers approved under the CAEP Teacher Preparation Standards – rigorous, nationally recognized standards that were developed to ensure excellence in educator preparation programs.

“This is a stamp of excellence that sets us apart from other programs,” said Professor Teresa DeBacker, who served as the CAEP coordinator for the college.

CAEP is the sole nationally recognized accrediting body for educator preparation. Accreditation is a nongovernmental activity based on peer review that serves the dual functions of assuring quality and promoting improvement. CAEP was created by the consolidation of the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education and the Teacher Education Accreditation Council.

Educator preparation providers seeking accreditation must pass peer review on five standards, which are based on two principles: solid evidence that the provider’s graduates are competent and caring educators, and solid evidence that the provider’s educator staff have the capacity to create a culture of evidence and use it to maintain and enhance the quality of the professional programs they offer.

“As a college of education, we recognize that teaching is a complex endeavor involving professional dispositions towards teaching and learning, the ability to understand and meet the needs of diverse learners, a deep understanding of content and pedagogical theories and practices, advocacy for equity, students, and learning, and a life-long desire to learn and improve,” said Stacy Reeder, acting dean of the Jeannine Rainbolt College of Education. “Our teacher education programs aim to develop outstanding teachers who will be leaders in their field. Receiving CAEP accreditation provides affirmation that we are meeting our goals with a well-developed teacher preparation program informed by research and driven by a desire for excellence.”

The process began for JRCoE three years ago as the move was made from NCATE accreditation to CAEP.

“In recent years, there was some concern among those involved in national accreditation that the NCATE focus, which was primarily on input, really wasn’t the right way to be looking at program quality,” DeBacker said. “Instead, we should be looking at outputs – instead of looking at the features of the program like courses and the field experience, we should be looking at the features of the students graduating from those programs.”

This shift from looking at inputs to outputs meant that the college couldn’t take the report from the previous round of accreditation and update it.

“We had to build an evaluation system from the ground up,” DeBacker said. “This has been a three-year process because we didn’t want this to be a simple exercise in compliance. We wanted to take the opportunity to look at our program in great detail according to our own standards of excellence, and then make sure that we were also gathering data that would satisfy the CAEP accrediting body.”

DeBacker, who at the time of the accreditation process also served as the associate dean for professional education, worked with faculty and the Education Professions Division counsel in the college to create the plan of evaluation, collect and organize the data and write the reports required by CAEP.

As CAEP was on a phase-in program, the college was only required to submit a plan for meeting CAEP standards and one round of data (normally three rounds of data on every indicator is required). Due to planning and the leadership of DeBacker, the Jeannine Rainbolt College of Education had complete rounds of data ready when the evaluation team made its visit in spring 2019. Because of that, the college was accredited with no areas for improvements and no stipulations and is one of the first schools in the country to be accredited on the basis of a full review of its undergraduate programs.

“They were very complimentary of our process, data and assessment system,” DeBacker said. “This is in no small part due to the work of our faculty who were instrumental in the decision making and getting the data from their own students.

“I can’t underscore the importance of the willingness of our faculty to seize this opportunity to undertake such careful self-study in support of determining what makes an excellent teacher and their commitment to maintaining such high standards.”