Auditors' judgment of commitment

The auditors are charged not only with verifying the evidence for commitment, but with determining whether the evidence is sufficient to support the program’s claim that the institution is committed to the program. The program faculty members are free to provide any evidence they find convincing of their institution’s commitment to their program, but they must address the issue of parity between the program and the institution in the Components of Capacity (4.1- 4.7) in making their case for commitment.

TEAC’s expectation is that the program faculty will provide evidence that the program is fairly treated and not different appreciably from the institution overall with respect to 4.1-4.7. The program, in other words, should receive its fair share and be treated like most of the other programs at the institution with regard to each of the components of program capacity (4.1 – 4.7).

The auditors’ conclusion that the institution is committed to the program requires that the evidence of parity in Appendix B receive a clean or qualified opinion. In forming their conclusion, the auditors are guided by the same heuristic that guides the Accreditation Panel with regard to its judgments of how much evidence is sufficient to support a claim. This heuristic, when applied to the evidence of commitment, supports the conclusion that the institution is committed to the program when at least 75% of the points of comparison show parity or favor the program.

Parity between the program and the institution is taken as signifying the institution’s commitment to the program. It is prima fascia evidence of commitment unless there is a credible rival hypothesis to the contrary. The mean salaries of the teacher education faculty and the mean salary for the institution as a whole, for example, could be indistinguishable and show a parity that would seemingly signify commitment. One salary might be for twelve months of effort, however, and the other for nine months of effort, or one might include overload teaching assignments while the other does not, etc. Thus, the salary parity reported in the Brief between the program and the institution may not always indicate institutional commitment, but may indicate the institution’s exploitation of the education program faculty. Or, the allocations of resources to the program faculty and the institution’s faculty in general may be the same, but the allocations to the education faculty may include unique costs not shared by the others (e.g., payments to cooperating teachers, a curriculum resource center, mileage for student teaching supervision, and so forth). The auditors must consider the possibility that parity in resource allocation may have come about for reasons that might signify that the institution is really not committed to the program.

While parity usually signifies commitment, the lack of parity may not be prima fascia evidence of a lack of commitment either. The faculty may claim, for example, that a discrepancy between program and institutional salaries is in fact evidence of commitment because the institution has added a disproportionately large number of new junior level positions to the program that were not available to other programs. The auditors would have targeted this salary claim, and if they had presumably verified the evidence for the claim, they could easily have gone on to conclude that the salary discrepancy, as explained, indicated the institution was in fact committed to the program with regard to compensation.

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