A Study on Accreditation of Teacher Education in the United States : The Recent Policies of National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE)

The purpose of this paper is to consider the meanings of the recent policies of National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) through analyzing these policies. NCATE is a professional accreditation agency focusing on teacher education units. The Department of Education and the Council for Higher Education Accreditation approve it. Thirty-three organizations, such as National Education Association, National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, and American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education, form NCATE and about 550 teacher education units are accredited. In recent years, NCATE took three main actions to make its accreditation more active. First, NCATE revised its standards in 2000. Second, NCATE made partnership with most states in regard to the states' approval systems of teacher preparation programs. This policy began in 1980s, but from the late 1990s the number of states which made partnership with NCATE increased. Third, NCATE worked with Interstate New Teacher Assessment and Support Consortium (INTASC) and National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS) and connected its standard with INTASC's and NBPTS's standards for the quality assurance of teachers. In this paper, I consider the meanings of these policies and focus on the objects of NCATE as a professional accreditation agency. NCATE's objects are "accountability" and "improvement". These correspond to the objects of accreditation-"quality assurance" and "quality improvement". Accreditation organizations, including NCATE, play a role in assuring and improving the quality of target institutions through accreditation. However, analyzing the recent policies NCATE is driving forward, I point out that these policies emphasized quality assurance of teacher education units rather than quality improvement