Certification of TEAC Procedures
The Accreditation Committee determines whether the TEAC staff has
complied throughout the accreditation process with TEAC’s
policies and regulations by examining the documentation provided
by the staff for each stage of the accreditation process (see Table
9 at the conclusion of the section). If the TEAC staff did not follow
a policy, the Committee would need to determine if the error had
a material effect on the accreditation recommendation. If the program
faculty were not given an opportunity to respond, for example, to
errors in the Audit Report (favorable or unfavorable to the program)
before it went to the Accreditation Panel, the Panel’s recommendation
might have been different from the one it submitted to the Accreditation
Committee. On the other hand, if the program faculty waived its
right to the full period it had in which to comment, the effect
on the recommendation might be negligible.
If the Director of the Accreditation Panel made
no suggestions for audit tasks, as recommended in TEAC’s policy,
and the Panel’s deliberations raised no additional issues
of verification, this departure from TEAC policy would be a matter
of no consequence. If the Panel’s deliberations, were frustrated
by the fact that some key pieces of evidence were not verified owing
to the auditors not receiving proper instructions, the Committee
might conclude that the audit would need to be done again, or that
some other remedy should be found to compensate for the effects
of the staff’s error. If the auditors strayed from the verification
of evidence into judgments about the meaning of the evidence in
the Inquiry Brief (apart from the evidence about institutional
commitment), the Committee would need to consider whether this auditors’
error, for example, interfered with the proper deliberations of
the Accreditation Panel. It may be, to take a less problematic issue,
that some important elements of TEAC’s procedures cannot be
documented directly owing to the staff’s oversight, carelessness,
inattention, and so forth (e.g., there may not be a letter formally
accepting the Inquiry Brief, Panel minutes might be silent
on the matter of a quorum, or some dues or fees may not have been
paid, etc.). Here again, the Committee will need to decide if the
point is sufficiently important to call into question the Panel’s
recommendation.
Occasionally there may be departures from TEAC’s
established policy that were driven by local exigencies. A conflict
of interest between the program and an auditor or Panel member may
not have been declared in a timely manner or at all. The Committee
would need to consider whether the existence of the conflict, or
even the appearance of the conflict, had compromised the auditors’
or Panel member’s conclusions. The auditors may have been
unable to avoid, as required in TEAC policies, occasions of “wining
and dining” while they were on the campus. Compromises in
the procedures may have been made over unavoidable changes in travel
plans, flight delays, and so forth. The Committee would need to
assure itself that these compromises were of little consequence.
It is the responsibility of the Accreditation Committee
to probe the evidence the staff has assembled to verify that the
procedures followed in each case have the integrity required by
TEAC’s system. Return to Method of the
Accreditation Committee
Scrutiny of the Accreditation Report
The TEAC system is designed so that the Accreditation Committee
would be able to easily certify that the TEAC staff followed TEAC’s
announced policies, and it would also be able to easily accept the
recommendations the Accreditation Panel has made in its Accreditation
Report. The method the Committee uses to determine whether it will
accept or reject the Panel’s recommendations is the common
method of falsification. If the Committee cannot falsify a Panel
recommendation, it should be accepted because it has withstood any
arguments or evidence against it.
In this method, the Committee considers each recommendation
in the Accreditation Report to see whether it can find some evidence
in the Inquiry Brief or Proposal, the Audit Report,
the Accreditation Report itself, or any other documentation about
the case that would undermine a recommendation or finding in the
Accreditation Report. The Panel, for example, may have recommended
a stipulation that the program must remedy its weak treatment of
the subject matter aspect of its teacher education program because
the Panel found the rationale or evidence in the program’s
Inquiry Brief or Inquiry Brief Proposal below
TEAC’s standard. The topic may have been overlooked, misconstrued,
or the modes of assessment may have been suspect with regard to
their validity. The Committee would seek to find evidence that would
undermine or falsify the Panel’s conclusion. The Committee,
for example, might find persuasive evidence of the valid assessment
of subject matter, or a cogent rationale for the assessment of subject
matter that adequately reflected the current state of scholarship
about the subject matter. In this case, and for reasons it could
make clear, the Committee would not accept the Panel’s recommendation
that accreditation be granted with a stipulation, and the stipulation
would be removed from the TEAC accreditation decision. However,
if the Committee could find no evidence or text that could undermine
or nullify the Panel’s recommendation of a stipulation on
the subject matter, the Committee would accept it and the stipulation
would stand.
The Panel, to take another example, may have recommended
provisional accreditation on the grounds that, while there was sufficient
evidence that the students had learned the elements of Quality
Principle I, the evidence was inconclusive about whether the
quality control system functioned appropriately. The Committee’s
approach on this point, as on all points, would be to seek evidence
that would disconfirm the Panel’s conclusion. The Committee
would examine the evidence about the internal audit presented in
the Inquiry Brief and in the Audit Report to see if it
were sufficient to support the program’s claim that the quality
control system functioned appropriately. To accept the Panel’s
recommendation, the Committee, in other words, would need to satisfy
itself that there was no persuasive evidence of the efficacy of
the program’s quality control system.
If the Panel were to recommend preaccreditation
or new program accreditation on the strength of the program’s
rationale, quality control system, and the evidence of commitment,
the Committee would examine the evidence, and seek evidence that
would show that the rationale was weak, or that the internal audit,
or the Audit Report, failed to confirm the evidence about the quality
control system, or that there was persuasive evidence that the institution
was not committed to the program. Should the Committee fail to find
evidence on these points, they would have to accept the Panel's
recommendation.
The Accreditation Committee’s method is closely
connected to the Panel’s method and is, in a sense, its mirror
image. The Committee is attempting find evidence for the opposite
of what the Panel claimed. Thus, when the Panel rejects an alternative
or rival explanation for a program faculty’s claim, the Committee
seeks to accept it. In a field like Education, where the evidence
is rarely conclusive, greater weight is given by necessity to the
Panel’s conclusions because of the difficulty in finding conclusive
evidence on any point that would rebut the Panel’s determination.
The standard of evidence for the Panel is somewhat lower in the
sense that the threshold for its recommendation is that the evidence
be consistent with the program faculty’s claims while the
standard for the Committee is that the evidence against the Panel’s
recommendation must be sufficient to falsify the recommendation.
In the end, the Accreditation Committee makes one of the determinations
set out in Table
8.
Return to Method
of the Accreditation Committee
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