Rethinking teacher education: The trouble with accountability

ABSTRACT

In many developed countries over the past two decades, there have been new standards, new monitoring systems, new course and fieldwork requirements for teacher candidates, new accreditation criteria, and/or new auditing procedures for colleges and universities that offer initial teacher preparation programmes. However there has also been enormous variation among accountability policies, initiatives, and approaches as well as an array of competing claims about their efficacy and impact in teacher education. This article suggests that accountability, on its own, is neither good nor bad, but rather depends on the larger policy and political agendas to which it is attached, how it is used, the goals, values, and purposes it serves, and the assumptions it makes about who should be accountable for what, to whom, and for what purposes. The article introduces the concept of intelligent professional responsibility as part of an alternative to dominant, audit-based accountability models in teacher education. Then the article explores the meaning and instantiation of this concept with examples of recent accountability developments in two interesting, but different policy, professional, and geopolitical contexts – the United States and Norway.

KEYWORDS:

• Teacher education
• initial teacher education
• accountability
• accreditation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. APT members included: Marilyn Cochran-Smith, Chair (Boston College, USA); Mikael Alexandersson (University of Gothenburg, Sweden); Viv Ellis (Kings College, UK); Lexie Grudnoff (University of Auckland New Zealand); Karen Hammerness (American Museum of Natural History, USA); Alis Oancea (University of Oxford, UK); and Auli Toom (University of Helsinki, Finland).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Marilyn Cochran-Smith

Marilyn Cochran-Smith is the Cawthorne Professor of Teacher Education at the Lynch School of Education and Human Development, Boston College, USA. Her research interests include practitioner inquiry and teacher education research, practice and policy with a focus on social justice and equity. Professor Cochran-Smith is a frequent speaker nationally and internationally. She has written 10 books, seven of which have won national awards, and more than 200 articles, chapters, and editorials. Her co-authored book, Reclaiming Accountability in Teacher Education, won the 2020 Best Book Award from the American Association of Colleges of Teacher Education (AACTE) and the American Educational Research Association’s (AERA) Division K’s 2019 Distinguished Contributions to Research award. Professor Cochran-Smith was also a 2020 winner of the Spencer Foundation’s prestigious Mentorship Award as well as the 2018 winner of the AERA Division K Lifetime Achievement Award. She is currently the principal investigator for a Spencer Foundation-funded study of U.S. ‘new graduate schools of education,’ which prepare teachers and award master’s degrees, but are not university-based or affiliated. Professor Cochran-Smith is an elected member of the National Academy of Education, a former president of AERA, an AERA Fellow, and an elected member of the Laureate Chapter of the Kappa Delta Pi National Education Honorary Society.