Faculty members seeking TEAC accreditation for their programs in educational leadership must affirm that their goal is to prepare “competent, caring, and qualified” leaders for the schools.(1) It is the program that is accredited by TEAC, not an administrative unit of the institution.

TEAC’s three quality principles are the means by which the faculty makes the case that its goal was achieved.

1.0 Quality Principle I: Evidence of Candidate Learning
The core of TEAC accreditation is the quality of the evidence that the program faculty members provide in support of their claims about their students’ learning and understanding of the professional education curriculum.

TEAC requires that the educational leadership faculty members address the following components of their program in ways that also indicate that they have an accurate and balanced understanding of the academic disciplines that are connected to the program:

Programs in educational leadership are at the graduate level and include an amalgam of the consensus literature in the following subjects: organizational theory and development; human resource management; school finance and law; instructional supervision; educational policy and politics; and data analysis and interpretation.

1.2 Strategic decision-making. The primary obligation of school leaders is to maintain and enhance an organization that meets the educational needs of the full range of the school’s students and to create an environment in which the district’s and school’s curriculum can be readily learned and understood by all the school’s students. To this end, TEAC requires evidence that the candidates learn how to (1) make decisions fairly and collaboratively, and do so informed by the relevant research and evidence; (2) formulate strategy to achieve the school’s goals; and (3) articulate and communicate an educational vision that is consistent with the school’s mission and the nation’s democratic ideals.

1.3 Caring leadership skills. Above all, educational leaders are expected to lead by acting on their knowledge in a caring and professional manner that results in appropriate levels of achievement for all the school’s pupils. Caring is a particular kind of relationship between the leader and the staff and students that is defined by the leader’s unconditional acceptance of the staff and students, the leader’s intention to address the staff’s and student’s professional and educational needs, the leader’s competence to meet those needs, and also by the students’ and staff’s recognition that the leader cares.(2)Although it recognizes that the available measures of caring are not as well developed as other measures of candidate performance, TEAC requires evidence that the program’s graduates are caring.

Cross-cutting themes. The liberal arts are often neglected in educational leadership programs, but because they cut across the program, the faculty must also provide evidence about them, as they would for any other aspects of their case for professional knowledge, strategic decision-making, and caring leadership skill.

Educational leaders are expected to be well-informed persons and the program should provide evidence that the candidates know and understand subject matters that are expected of educated persons. These include the oral and written rhetorical skills, critical thinking, and the qualitative and quantitative reasoning skills that foster independent learning. They also include knowledge of other perspectives and cultures and the modern technological tools of scholarship and administration.

• Learning how to learn. There is a set of intellectual skills, tools, and ideas that enable leaders to learn on their own. The program’s graduates must know how to acquire those other parts of the field that could not be taught in the program, but which the graduates will nevertheless be expected to know and use at some later time. The whole of the professional knowledge base cannot be covered in the curriculum, some of what is covered may not be true or useful later, and some of what will be needed later would not have been known at the time of the degree program. TEAC requires evidence that the candidates learned how to learn important information on their own, that they can transfer what they have learned to new contexts, and that they have acquired the dispositions and skills for life-long learning in their field.
  
• Multicultural perspectives and understanding. The liberal arts include knowledge of other cultural perspectives, practices, and traditions. TEAC requires evidence that the candidates for the degree (or certificate program) understand the implications of confirmed scholarship on gender, race, individual differences, and ethnic and cultural perspectives for educational practice.(3)
  
• Technology. Increasingly, the tools of a liberal arts education are based on technology, and candidates should know the technologies that enhance the work of leaders and staff and the students’ learning.(4) TEAC requires evidence that graduates have acquired the basic productivity tools of the profession.

  Technology, learning to learn, multicultural perspectives are essential parts of the leader’s professional knowledge and skill. It makes little sense to claim that candidates understand how to organize the school’s schedule, for example, if they do not also know and understand (1) the technological dimensions of scheduling, (2) the implications of the scheduling options for different cultural groups, (3) how to fill in the gaps in their knowledge of scheduling and apply what they have learned in their program to new situations, and (4) how the schedule fits with the rest of the school’s purpose, values, mission, and so forth.

  The case that the program’s graduates have sufficient professional knowledge, for example, of assessment, would include evidence that they know how to (1) solve assessment problems they were not directly taught (e.g., NCLB disaggregation); (2) learn new areas of assessment (e.g., value-added assessment); (3) evaluate the implications of other cultural practices on assessment (e.g., cheating or face-saving); and (4) use computer programs appropriately in implementing school-wide assessments.

  Leaders can be said to have acquired leadership skill at the level TEAC envisions if, when they communicate with their faculty, for example, (1) they employ the teaching technologies that are available because they understand them, (2) they make their point to all the staff because of their lack of knowledge of individual and cultural differences, (3) they are convincing because they develop professionally on their own and know how to apply what they have learned to novel situations.
  
  And, they can be said to have acquired leadership skill at a sufficient level, if they know how to distinguish essential educational issues from the peripheral, ethical administrative practices from the unethical ones, knowledge from opinion, administrative prerogative from effective delegation, and the unique leadership responsibilities of schooling in a democratic society from schooling in a non-democratic one.

2.0 Quality Principle II: Valid assessment of leader learning
TEAC expects program faculty to provide a rationale that shows that the assessment techniques it uses are reasonable and credible. However the program faculty members assess what their candidates have learned, TEAC requires the program to provide evidence that the inferences made from the assessment system meet the accepted research standards for reliability and validity.

This means that faculty members must rule out competing and rival inferences for their evidence of candidate learning, and establish a point at which the evidence for their inference is sufficient, clear, and consistent, and below which the evidence for their inference is insufficient or inconsistent. To do this, the faculty needs to undertake inquiry on the following two aspects of the assessment of candidate learning:

• 2.1 Rationale for the links. TEAC requires that the faculty members have a rationale for its assessments that shows that the links between assessments and
• the program goal,
• the faculty claims made about candidate learning, and
• the program’s features (5) are reasonable and credible.

The faculty members who claim, for example, that their program prepares instructional leaders would need to make a case that their ways of assessing instructional leadership are reasonable and logical; they would need to explain how their assessments are related conceptually to the program requirements and to their claims about what the candidates know, and why the inferences they make about the graduates are credible

Before the faculty members conclude that their assessments showed that the graduates learn how to be instructional leaders, they would need to rule out that their graduates had merely memorized or parroted their instructional leadership responses, or endorsed administrative practices that thwarted pupil learning, or failed to anticipate the unintended negative consequences for instruction of an otherwise acceptable administrative decision, etc.

2.2 Evidence of valid assessment. The faculty must satisfy itself and TEAC that its rationale and the inferences from its assessments are also empirically credible and supported with local evidence about the trustworthiness, reliability, and validity of the assessment method the faculty employed.

3.0 Quality Principle III: Institutional learning
TEAC expects that a faculty’s decisions about its programs are based on evidence, and that the program has a quality control system that (1) yields reliable evidence about the program’s practices and results and (2) influences policies and decision making.

Quality Principle III is about the faculty’s system of inquiry, review, and quality control by which the faculty secures the evidence and informed opinion needed to initiate or improve program quality. TEAC expects that the faculty will systematically and continuously improve the quality of its educational leadership program and provide evidence about the following two issues:

3.1 Program decisions and planning based on evidence. TEAC requires evidence that the information derived from faculty’s quality control monitoring and inquiry has a role in the improvement of the program. Quality control entails an investigation of any local factors that are associated with, and implicated in, candidate learning and its assessment.

3.2 Influential quality control system. The faculty’s quality control system must examine and evaluate the components of the program’s capacity for quality, including, its curriculum, candidates, faculty expertise, program and course requirements, facilities, and so forth. TEAC requires evidence, based on an internal audit conducted by the program’s faculty, that the system functions as it was designed, that it promotes the program’s continual improvement, and that it yields evidence that supports the first and second quality principles.

Although any number of factors and components of the program may affect program quality, TEAC does require the program faculty to address at least seven components, most of which seems to have a plausible association with candidate learning and program quality. These seven dimensions are based upon the US Secretary of Education’s requirement that any accreditor recognized by the Secretary as a reliable gatekeeper for federal funding must have standards for seven dimensions of program capacity: curriculum, faculty, resources, facilities, accurate publications, student support services, and student feedback

4.0 Standards of capacity for program quality
TEAC defines a quality program as one that has credible evidence that it satisfies the three quality principles. However, TEAC also requires the program faculty to provide evidence that it has the capacity--curriculum, faculty, resources, facilities, publications, student support services, and policies--to support student learning and program quality. This evidence should be independent of student learning and based on some traditional input features of capacity

The program faculty can make the case that it has sufficient capacity for quality in any way that meets scholarly standards of evidence; however, TEAC requires that the faculty cover the following basic three points in making its case:

1. Quality control. The faculty must show that it monitors systematically the quality of the curriculum, faculty, facilities, resources, candidate support services, publications, and that the system is sensitive and responds to candidate comment and com-plaint. This is just another way of saying that the faculty adheres to Quality Principle III.

2. Evidence of commitment. The faculty must also show evidence that the institution is committed to the program. Commitment is most conveniently seen in the evidence of parity of the program with the institution. The program must at least have the normative capacity of the institution’s academic programs with regard to the quality of the curriculum, faculty, facilities, resources, candidate support services, publications, and feature sit shares with the institutions other programs.

3. Unique capacity. The faculty must also monitor whatever unique capacity is needed for program quality (e.g., an administrative internship). Because the field has no firm consensus about any standard for unique capacity other than it be sufficient to insure that the program’s graduates are competent, caring, and qualified, these capacity standards are inevitably a matter for further inquiry and hypothesis testing.

TEAC and State Standards
The TEAC framework is also compatible with the standards promulgated by many states and professional educational organizations. TEAC’s framework easily accommodates, for exam-le, the six standards of the Interstate School Leaders Licensure Consortium (ISLLC) and the seven standards of the National Policy Board for Educational Administration (NPBEA). The program faculty members are free to adopt these standards and to organize the Inquiry Brief around them, as they are an equivalent and permissible way to satisfy the content of Quality Principle I.

Return to TEAC accreditation process overview or goal and quality principles overview