Graduate-level teacher and educational leadership programs.
Purpose:
To establish minimum admission standards for graduate level teacher and leader preparation programs and requirements for the suspension and/or deregistration of certain programs with completers who fail to achieve a minimum pass rate on certification examinations for three consecutive years.
Text or summary was published
in the October 7, 2015 issue of the Register, I.D. No. EDU-40-15-00009-EP.
Final rule as compared with last published rule:
No changes.
Text of rule and any required statements and analyses may be obtained from:
Kirti Goswami, New York State Education Department, Office of Counsel, State Education Building, Room 148, 89 Washington Ave., Albany, NY 12234, (518) 474-6400, email: legal@nysed.gov
Initial Review of Rule
As a rule that requires a RFA, RAFA or JIS, this rule will be initially reviewed in the calendar year 2019, which is no later than the 3rd year after the year in which this rule is being adopted.
Assessment of Public Comment
Since publication of a Notice of Emergency Adoption and Proposed Rule Making in the State Register on October 7, 2015, the State Education Department (SED) received the following comments:
1. COMMENT:
The language in the item itself states that the GRE and 3.0 are only for candidates seeking their first, initial certification (last paragraph on page 2). However, the actual regulation change included doesn’t have that qualification and just states that the new standards are for graduate teacher and school building leader programs (third paragraph on page 5). As such, it is unclear if this applies to traditional initial cert candidates, or to all candidates (including Trans B candidates and candidates seeking additional certifications). Clarification around this issue would be greatly appreciated.
DEPARTMENT RESPONSE: The underlying statute does not limit the new admissions requirements to only students who are seeking their initial certification. The reference to an initial certificate in the Regents item was an inadvertent error. Therefore, the Department will revise the Regents item accordingly. However, since the reference to the initial certificate is not in the regulation, no regulatory changes are needed.
2. COMMENT:
Does this regulation specify that the revised general test (GRE) is required i.e., verbal reasoning, quantitative reasoning, and analytical writing but not GRE subject tests?
DEPARTMENT RESPONSE: Although the underlying statute does not specify the GRE general test, the Department believes that is what is meant. It should also be noted that the statute includes the option for an institution to identify a substantially equivalent admission examination to the GRE.
3. COMMENT:
Does this regulation (GRE) also apply to programs that lead to additional certification, i.e., advanced certificate programs?
DEPARTMENT RESPONSE: Yes, the admissions requirements apply to all graduate-level teacher and educational leadership programs. As stated in the response to Comment No. 1, the Department will remove the reference in the Regents item to initial certification.
4. COMMENT:
Currently, Teachers College has entrance examination requirement for admission across all teacher education programs. Applications for admission to Teachers College’s 2016 summer and fall programs have already been printed and disseminated. As such, given the ability of students admitted for 2016 to have flexibility on when they “commence” instruction, we would suggest a 1-year exemption to allow for a transition to the new mandate. This limited flexibility will permit Teachers College (and possibly other programs) to establish the appropriate “substantially equivalent” entrance exam or other relevant assessments to be aligned with the law.
A one year exemption would also allow Teachers College the time to prepare for admissions and provide accurate information at recruiting events as well as in admissions and application materials.
DEPARTMENT RESPONSE: Adding a 1-year effective date as requested by the commenter would necessitate an amendment to the underlying statute and is not something that the Department can accomplish through regulation. However, the statute and proposed regulation permit institutions to exempt up to 15% of any incoming class from the selection criteria upon a determination by the institution that a student has demonstrated the potential to positively contribute to the teaching profession.
5. COMMENT:
Teachers College allows students to defer admission for one year. Students admitted to either Spring, Summer or Fall 2015, for example, have already been approved to defer their admission to Fall 2016. The new state regulations directly affect these students because they were not required to have a GRE score when TC first offered them admission in 2015. At the time that they deferred their admission to 2016, they were informed that no additional application materials are required prior to enrollment in 2016. A transition year would allow us to enroll such students under our current guidelines.
DEPARTMENT RESPONSE: Adding a transition year as requested by the commenter would necessitate an amendment to the underlying statute and is not something that the Department can accomplish through regulation. However, the statute and proposed regulation permit institutions to exempt up to 15% of any incoming class from the selection criteria upon a determination by the institution that a student has demonstrated the potential to positively contribute to the teaching profession.
6. COMMENT:
I am deeply troubled by and opposed to the implementation of a GRE requirement for our programs in teacher certification for the following reasons:
1) based on research on such high stakes tests and their disparate effect on specific populations, such a requirement will accelerate the "whitening" of the teaching force;
2) given the new requirement of a 3.0 GPA, it is unclear why we need this additional test that doesn't correlate any better with later academic success;
3) there is absolutely no evidence that particular scores on the GRE correlate well with success as a teacher and there are too many variables to even begin to determine a meaningful correlation;
4) this will penalize students who wish to teach subjects other than math, because they will have had no recent educational experience that allows them to succeed on those standardized questions;
5) this will of course make a tidy profit for those selling preparation guides and test prep programs and thus throw up another block to aspiring teachers who do not have the means to pay for such tutoring;
6) this adds to the already astronomical expense to pursue certification;
7) it does little but intensify the emphasis on testing that has caused so much anger and disgust among teachers, parents, and teacher educators in NY State;
8) it confuses particular test taking skills with teaching ability;
9) such a requirement further strips autonomy from teacher education programs who best can determine who should be admitted, because it requires another standardized admission requirement that ignores differences in background, resources and context.
DEPARTMENT RESPONSE: Most of the comments are really about the underlying statute and are not something that the Department can address through regulation. However, the statute includes the option for an institution to identify a substantially equivalent admission examination to the GRE. In addition, the statute and regulation provide for an exemption of up to 15% of any incoming class from the selection criteria upon a determination by the institution that a student has demonstrated the potential to positively contribute to the teaching profession.
7. COMMENT:
The legitimate authority of the local independent college and university is eroded by the action both of the law and the concomitant amendments. Local faculty and administrators are in a better position to make judgments about the “prediction of success as leaders” and the impact of rigorous classroom success. It is inappropriate for the SED to replace this judgment with a system that is dramatically flawed.
DEPARTMENT RESPONSE: See Response to Comment No. 6.
8. COMMENT:
The amendments propose that Educational Leadership programs create “rigorous selection criteria”. This provision presumes that there is not a “rigorous selective criteria with predictive success” in place. Most Graduate Schools have in their Educational Leadership criteria for admission, a need for a Master’s degree successfully completed along with permanent certification as a teacher or pupil personnel services in New York State. Advanced Certificate programs also require a Master’s degree and a minimum of 45 graduate credits. To intimate that a “rigorous selection criteria” may not be in existence is a false assumption. They already exist in most programs.
DEPARTMENT RESPONSE: This comment is about the underlying statute and is not something that the Department can address through regulation.
9. COMMENT:
This requirement is at the essence of these amendments and is replete with numerous psychometric and statistical issues which I will list and describe. The limitations of this testing, particularly, in the School Building Leader exam is extraordinary. First, there has been a lack of appropriate field testing by Pearson. This limitation has been delineated by the Metropolitan Council of Educational Administration (MCEAP). The letter sent by the organization to the SED, indicates, in detail, numerous issues of validity, reliability and fairness to those preparing for school building leadership positions upon program completion. Numerous problems were found in validity, reliability, and fairness. In terms of the test’s validity, MCEAP said “that the items do not actually discriminate leadership candidate readiness, as other choices appear plausible and the correct answers would not be problematic if done as second choice. In terms of reliability, there was a great concern that bias issues may make the test question dilemmas more difficult based on lack of exposure to the test question dilemmas(urban, suburban, rural)”. Also, MCEAP believes that the “versions of the various tests may not be measuring the same set of skills and proficiencies”. Additionally, “test is biased against individuals who do not read quickly and memorize information readily”. In terms of fairness, the state assessments require knowledge and skill of resources that are not readably available or easily available. “ Given testing limitations and documented by MCEAP, to suspend and end an Education Leadership Program based on these results is inadvisable, inaccurate and unfair at best. Additionally, for many of the components of both exams, there are questionable responses (which I and others as practitioners for many years) believe could be accepted as correct but are rejected by the examiners since they require a forced choice response.
DEPARTMENT RESPONSE: The comments relate to the validity of the school building leader examination are outside the scope of the proposed amendment. Nevertheless, the Department believes the examination is valid and properly assesses the minimum knowledge, skills and abilities required of a school building leader.
Moreover, the Department believes that if fewer than 50 percent of the program completers in a graduate teacher or educational leadership program pass each examination required for certification for three consecutive academic years, the Department should be able to suspend the program’s authority to admit new students. Programs need to properly prepare candidates to ensure that they are able to enter the building on day 1 and be successful. Therefore, the Department believes that programs should be held accountable for the performance of their students on these exams, particularly in instances where fewer than 50 percent of their students are passing an examination required for certification.
10. COMMENT:
The criteria describing annual “cohort” referenced in the amendments could have graduate students from previous cohorts or from students many years previous who have completed their program, and then, decide to take the state exam some significant years after their courses have ended. Colleges have no control over when these teachers or administrators who are graduate students take the state exams, even if it is many years after their course work has ended. Obviously, they will count toward the potential passage/failure rate for the particular year. This fact contaminates the results from year to year.
DEPARTMENT RESPONSE: The proposed amendment implements the provisions of the statute and, therefore, a statutory change would be needed.
11. COMMENT:
The small number of program completers who take the SBL and/or SDL exams can have the impact of inflating the passage/failure rate which in turn, will provide a distorted picture of the annual cohort rate and could lead to possible suspension of the program over a three year period. Obviously, these results will have a potentially detrimental impact.
DEPARTMENT RESPONSE: Education Law § 210-b allows the Department to adjust its methodology for determining examination passage rates for one or more certification examinations to account for sample size and accuracy. The Department has done this and has decided to use a sample size of at least 10 test scores.
12. COMMENT:
Several commenters did not support the program requirement of a minimum score on the GRE as research on the predictive ability of GRE tests and other similar assessments is not entirely certain, may create a negative disproportionate impact with the policy, would likely exclude the very teachers we need to recruit to serve the diverse populations in our schools today, and are even less predictive for graduate study than they are for undergraduate study. Further, the GRE poorly predicts STEM success among females and students of color. Finally, these scores have demonstrated a weak predictive capacity for only the first year of graduate study, not for overall graduate school success. Given that a more important indicator of interest for the public welfare might be candidates’ performance after having graduated from our programs, weak predictors of first-year success in program seem ill advised as admission standards.
Given no definitive predictive data, setting cut scores at the State level would not be defensible. Thus, it is appropriate that the emergency regulation recognized that individual institutions would need to set the bar for entry scores according to their own understandings of such tests’ ability to provide useful information about admitted candidates. However, such varying standards will in the end offer little evidence of the State’s commitment to the general welfare, as the bar in some programs could be so low as to be meaningless. Over time, collecting these data might provide more insight into whether GRE scores offer any actionable information for teacher candidate admissions, and those data might be of interest to the State. However, this hypothetical future benefit of the proposed regulation seems far outweighed by the challenges in equity, defensibility, and added cost to prospective teachers, who already spend nearly $1000 to take exams for their certification.
DEPARTMENT RESPONSE: The proposed amendment implements Education Law § 210-a and therefore any comments relating to the underlying statute must be pursued through a legislative change. However, the statute does provide the option for an institution to identify a substantially equivalent admission examination to the GRE. The statute and proposed regulation also permit institutions to exempt up to 15% of any incoming class from the selection criteria upon a determination by the institution that a student has demonstrated the potential to positively contribute to the teaching profession.
13. COMMENT:
To ensure potential teachers have the knowledge and skills they need, teacher candidates in New York already have more hours of examinations than do doctors, lawyers, and engineers in order to receive their initial certificates. It is reasonable to believe that the requirements for content knowledge such as that tested on the GRE will be amply assessed through standardized testing by the time candidates seek licensure. Requiring candidates to pay for yet another exam seems a meaningless excess—especially since the exam offers virtually no predictive validity.
DEPARTMENT RESPONSE: The proposed amendment implements Education Law § 210-a. Therefore, a legislative change would be needed to address this comment.
14. COMMENT:
Another way to regulate admissions concerns is to have institutions of higher education participate in knowledge-building activities around performance-based assessments for candidate selection. Incentivizing programs to develop meaningful, rigorous performance-based intake processes could help the State better understand what qualities future educators should be screened for. Alternatively, having admission candidates succeed on content knowledge tests the State has designed for certification could discourage individuals who might not take the education profession seriously from applying in the first instance.
Accordingly, language along the lines of the following might be more appropriate for the admissions regulation: “…establish rigorous minimum selection criteria geared to predicting a candidate’s academic success in the program. The law requires candidates who are seeking their first initial certificate admitted to such programs to have a minimum cumulative undergraduate grade point average of 3.0 or higher in the candidate’s undergraduate program. Additionally, candidates must either 1) have achieved a minimum score, to be set by the institution, on the Graduate Record Examination (GRE), 2) have achieved passing scores on the ALST and on the Multi-Subjects exams appropriate for the level of licensure, or 3) have succeeded in an intensive multi-stage admissions assessment process with defensible criteria, reliable scoring approaches, and longitudinal assessment of admissions criteria correlations with program outcomes.”
DEPARTMENT RESPONSE: The proposed amendment implements Education Law § 210-a. This comment is related to the underlying statute and is not something that the Department can address through regulation. However, the statute includes the option for an institution to identify a substantially equivalent admission examination to the GRE. The statute and proposed regulation also permit institutions to exempt up to 15% of any incoming class from the selection criteria upon a determination by the institution that a student has demonstrated the potential to positively contribute to the teaching profession.
15. COMMENT:
The requirement for programs to submit to the State candidates who have graduated in the preceding year is defined as July 1 through June 30. Federal accountability and CAEP accreditation requirements use the reporting timeframe of September 1 through August 31. To reduce paperwork and reporting burdens and to align data analyses, I urge the Regents to change the reporting definition of “preceding year” to September 1 through August 31.
DEPARTMENT RESPONSE: Education Law § 210-b defines the academic year for this purpose as July 1 through June 30. The proposed amendment merely implements the statutory definition of the academic year. To change this definition, a statutory change is needed.
16. COMMENT:
We are opposed to having the Board of Regents mandate particular selection criteria for all colleges. Although the stated intent is “predicting a candidate’s academic success in its program,” there is absolutely no evidence that requiring a minimum GPA of 3.0 or a minimum score on a standardized assessment will predict success.
Equally important, these new criteria will thwart critical efforts to diversify the teaching force by recruiting more men and women from under-represented populations. Many of the individuals from these groups fall into what appears to be an intractable achievement gap. As a group their grades and standardized test scores are below the level of the majority, and may well be below the minimum requirements set by the State.
Implementation of the proposed minimum requirements will keep candidates who have the potential to succeed from entering our program. Like all teacher preparation programs across New York State, the number of students in our programs has declined in recent years. Further decreases will threaten the viability of what has been for many years a highly successful program. In a small program such as ours the ability to exempt up to 15% of an incoming class from these requirements could mean as few as 2-3 students.
DEPARTMENT RESPONSE: The proposed amendment implements Education Law § 210-a. This comment is related to the underlying statute and is not something that the Department can address through regulation. However, the statute includes the option for an institution to identify a substantially equivalent admission examination to the GRE. The statute and proposed regulation also permit institutions to exempt up to 15% of any incoming class from the selection criteria upon a determination by the institution that a student has demonstrated the potential to positively contribute to the teaching profession.
