Education prof leads national
teaching accreditation effort

Throughout his career, Frank Murray, H. Rodney Sharp Professor of Education and Psychology, has been a noted leader in teacher education reform. Currently, he is serving as the first president of the Teacher Education Accreditation Council (TEAC), which was established in 1997 to provide an innovative and different method of accrediting teacher education programs. The National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE), established in 1954, has been the primary accrediting organization.

Under Murray's leadership for the past three years, TEAC is earning its credentials. According to an article in the May 23 issue of Education Week, TEAC has "now won a key endorsement" from the Council for Higher Education Accreditation (CHEA), which has added TEAC to "its list of more than 25 accreditors deemed worthy of providing rigorous evaluations of collegiate academic programs in their respective fields."

"It is exciting for TEAC to receive this recognition from the Council for Higher Education Accreditation, which gives our members confidence that TEAC is leading in the right direction in the accreditation field," Murray said. Member schools include Cornell and New York universities, the universities of Iowa, Virginia and Michigan and Michigan State and Iowa State universities and several other liberal arts schools that have small teacher education programs.

In addition, TEAC has been endorsed by the National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges, the American Association of State Colleges and Universities, the National Association of Independent Colleges and the Association of American Universities.

As its next step, TEAC is in the process of seeking recognition from the U.S. Department of Education.

According to Murray, TEAC's approach to accreditation is an academic auditing process where teacher education programs must substantiate their claims about their programs and show that their graduates are caring, qualified and competent teachers. As he wrote in an article in the Journal of Teacher Education, TEAC requires "solid and convincing evidence...[that] graduates in fact acquired the knowledge, disposition and skill their academic degree indicates."

Under TEAC's auditing system, which accredits individual teacher education programs rather than entire schools or departments, programs will be able to identify their strengths and weaknesses, improve and build on their strengths and deal with any problems that may exist, Murray said.

Similar systems have been used successfully in Great Britain and the Netherlands. In the United States, TEAC was established by an alliance of organizations, education departments, educators and college presidents under the leadership of the Council of Independent Colleges, representing approximately 420 small liberal arts colleges, which continue to support reform in teacher accreditation and TEAC.

"Many educators have felt that NCATE was too inflexible and arbitrary in its approach to accreditation, relying on standards based on consensus rather than research," Murray said. "In addition, accreditation by NCATE was expensive, time consuming and did not give schools input on how to improve their programs. One result of this is more than half the teacher education programs in such schools as Harvard, Swarthmore, Mt. Holyoke, and some large state universities did not bother to seek accreditation.

"The formation of TEAC has opened up a dialogue about what accreditation should accomplish, and NCATE has proposed some internal changes that appear to be similar to TEAC's approach," Murray said.

A former dean of education and director of the Center for Educational Leadership and Policy at UD, Murray chaired the Holmes Group, a consortium of research universities engaged in educational reform, for eight years and served as executive director of its successor the Holmes Partnership. He also was cofounder and president of the Project 30 Alliance, whose goal was the reform of the link between the arts and sciences and teacher education.

Sue Fuhrmann, education, serves as TEAC membership coordinator and James Raths, education, leads the audit function.

–Sue Moncure