Evidentiary Standards for Consensus Standards in Teacher Education

Overview & Synopsis

The standards that currently define a quality teacher or teacher education program derive their authority from the consensus of experts, who negotiate and craft statements that codify their views of best practice. In education, these consensus statements are rarely rooted in the field's established scholarship (as is the case for many standards in medicine and engineering) but are simply well-intentioned expert opinion and preference. When the scholarship in a field is contested and uncertain as it is in teacher education, prevailing standards are only the profession's best guess about what will make things better, each awaiting systematic scholarly investigation and verification. In this article, the author talks about evidentiary standards for consensus standards in teacher education. He stresses that vastly more important than the prose of common core, Interstate Teacher Assessment and Support Consortium, accreditation, and other consensus standards are the standards for what counts as evidence to deem that these standards are met.