Centering Equity in Teacher Education Evaluation: From Principles to Transformative Enactment

Abstract

Since the early 2000s, accountability and evaluation have been regarded by policymakers as key mechanisms for “fixing” teacher education and by many teacher education leaders as vehicles for elevating the status of the profession and uniting a fragmented field. Although educational inequity has been an enduring and endemic problem during the same time period, most major policy proposals regarding teacher education evaluation and accountability have said very little about equity. This article makes an argument for equity-centered teacher education evaluation and accountability by highlighting nine innovative examples that collectively illustrate what it means and what it looks like to position equity at the center of teacher education evaluation/accountability. Together, these examples are intended to be generative, providing a lens into how the interrelated dimensions of strong equity-centered evaluation play out at different sites of practice and how equity initiatives emerge and operate at different levels of policy.