U of A Dean Smith Founding Member of National Group Aiming to Improve Teacher Preparation

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Tom Smith

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. – Tom Smith, dean of the College of Education and Health Professions at the University of Arkansas, has joined with 17 education school deans from across the country to establish “Deans for Impact,” a group dedicated to producing better teachers.

The group’s first official action was to publicly support and make recommendations on proposed federal rule changes concerning teacher preparation in the United States.

The rule changes were proposed by the U.S. Department of Education in November and would go into effect in 2020. One of the recommendations made by Deans for Impact is that the government move more quickly, implementing the rules two years earlier, in 2018, instead.

In a letter to U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, the group also recommended that the U.S. education department:

• Keep new rules that tie program accountability to multiple measures of learning outcomes.
• Set effective minimum guidelines for collecting data that includes teacher admissions profiles, teacher placement information, teacher performance and student learning outcomes based on multiple measures and teacher retention.
• Conduct research to evaluate outcome models to ensure the shift in accountability leads to productive change.
• Consider removing an exemption for low-performing programs that predominantly train teachers for STEM subjects from another provision in the new rules that would take away federal TEACH grants from students studying in programs that are determined to be ineffective.
• Increase the number of highly effective educators, including higher percentages of teachers of color, to serve students in high-need areas and hard-to-staff subjects and schools.

Deans for Impact was officially launched Jan. 26 with the unveiling of a website and release of the letter to Duncan. The group’s members have been meeting for about two years. Smith said he met Benjamin Riley, its executive director, in the spring of 2013 when Riley spoke on a panel at a meeting of the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education. Riley previously worked as the policy director for a national education nonprofit organization and as a deputy attorney general for the state of California, working primarily on education-related policy issues.

“He spoke about significant changes to teacher preparation and that resonated with me,” said Smith, who holds the rank of University Professor of special education. “Our group is in the process of becoming a nonprofit organization that will be based in Austin, Texas. Our goal is to transform teacher preparation, and our main focus is examining how to gauge effectiveness of teacher preparation by how effective teachers are in the classroom.”

Members of Deans for Impact come from a diverse range of institutions that collectively train more than 15,000 teachers annually. The College of Education and Health Professions at the U of A offers both traditional and nontraditional teacher-preparation programs that lead to licensure. During his tenure as dean, Smith supported the establishment of an alternative teacher certification program called Arkansas Teacher Corps, now in its third year.

“Everybody knows and everybody agrees that the most important factor in kids learning is having an effective teacher, so we need to find better ways to prepare our teachers,” Smith said. “By collecting, using and sharing valid evidence of teacher effectiveness to improve educator-preparation programs, we can be a part of elevating the education profession.”

Deans for Impact adopted a set of guiding principles that the group says embodies a fundamental shift in the design and expectations of teacher-preparation programs:

• Focusing on outcomes – using common metrics and assessments that validly measure graduates’ effects in the classroom.
• Emphasis on data – collecting, sharing and using data to drive evidence-based change within programs and across the field of teacher preparation.
• Empirical validation – using tools of research to identify the features of teacher-preparation programs that improve student learning.
• Transparency and accountability – elevating expectations for teacher-preparation program accountability and making program outcomes transparent to all.

In addition to the University of Arkansas, the founding deans are from Temple University, Johns Hopkins University, University of Missouri-St. Louis, Southern Methodist University, University of Southern California, Lesley University, University of Texas of the Permian Basin, Relay Graduate School of Education, Arizona State University, University of Idaho, Loyola Marymount University, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, East Carolina University, University of Virginia, Texas Tech University, Boston Teacher Residency, and Hunter College, City University of New York.