Education program seeks to switch accreditation by 2011
The College of Education and Human Services is in the process of changing the accreditation of the Teacher Education and Professional Development Program for the start of the 2011-12 academic year.
The TEPD currently is accredited by the National Council for Accreditations of Teacher Education and has maintained that accreditation since January 1, 1954 according to NCATE.org. The program is accredited with NCATE through the end of 2010-11 academic year.
The program has decided to let the accreditation with NCATE expire and will now seek national accreditation with the Teacher Education Accreditation Council, according to Karen Adams, dean of the College of Education and Human Services. Adams feels that switching to TEAC will better serve the department.
"TEAC is more in line with where we want to be as a program," Adams said. "They allow for more room for research for the program... we are very pleased with the decision."
Adams said education students will never be in a position where the program is without accreditation.
"If we changed our minds and there are problems with TEAC, which we don't foresee, we can always go back to NCATE," she said.
Teacher education and professional development professor Raymond W. Francis said that TEAC will bring fewer restrictions than NCATE.
"(NCATE) is a very standards driven, very administrative heavy, bureaucratic heavy kind of a system," Francis said. "TEAC is much more faculty driven through looking at program quality. It's a much more involved kind of collegial kind of a process."
The decision to switch to TEAC was not a hastily-made decision, Francis said.
"This was a decision we didn't go into lightly," he said. "We've had faculty and administrators from the university go to a number of different TEAC training events, workshops and conferences. We've had faculty participate as observers in audits and things that TEAC is doing. We are very confident in the decision we are making."
Francis said the TEPD held an internal vote last year about switching to TEAC and said the results were overwhelming in favor of making the switch.
The department has scheduled a TEAC audit for the fall 2010. If the department decides to go back to NCATE, NCATE would come for their regularly scheduled visit in the spring of 2011. CMU is one of many state public universities seeking accreditation with TEAC, joining Michigan State, University of Michigan-Flint, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, Oakland University and Northern Michigan University.
Public universities in Michigan are not required to have national accreditation until 2013, so Adams feels that CMU teaching students are ahead of the curve.
TEAC was founded in 1997 and currently has 65 member institutions in nine states and has another 93 schools up for accreditation spread over 13 states. TEAC is nationally recognized by the U.S. Department of Education and the Council for Higher Education Accreditation, according to TEAC.org.
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