Multicultural perspectives: The accuracy of the curriculum with respect to sound scholarship on matters of race, gender, individual differences, and ethnic and cultural perspective. TEAC requires evidence that the candidates for the degree understand the qualifications that must be made in their knowledge with respect to confirmed scholarship on gender, race, individual differences, and ethnic and cultural perspectives.

National Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE ) is a coalition of 33 specialty professional associations of teachers, teacher educators, con-tent specialists, and local and state policy makers. Like TEAC, it has established standards and procedures for accrediting colleges and schools of education.

New program accreditation: New program accreditation status signifies that the program faculty has proposed a valid way of measuring its students’ learning, has a sound rationale for the program, has a quality control system in place to monitor and improve program quality, and has evidence of institutional commitment to the program.

When a program is new, for example, or has been substantially modified recently, it may have had no opportunity to acquire evidence for its claims, but it still could have evidence of a sound quality control system, institutional commitment, and a plan and rationale for acquiring the evidence to support its claims that TEAC requires for accreditation. Or, it may be that a program has a respectable reputation for quality and success, but the evidence that presumably supports and corroborates the reputation has not been systematically collected and examined recently to see if it continues to support the program’s exemplary reputation.

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