How do high stakes testing, school choice, voucher schemes and low funding work together? If you privatize and "outsource," if you make individual schools, parents and teachers solely responsible for their kids' progress with fewer resources to go on, then there has to be a bottom line, a measure of "who wins" in the educational market. Tests allow comparisons between schools so we know who wins and loses, and can blame teachers, kids and their parents for their failures. The notion of public responsibility for education, even the assumption of the need for public and civic spaces and communities, is eroded, but administrators and teachers and parents and children scrambling for their own places on the ladder may hardly notice.
             Where does teacher education fit into this picture? Concern about higher education's capacity to prepare quality teachers has reached unprecedented proportions. Federal policy makers have responded by passing Title II of the Higher Education Reauthorization Act of 1998, which purportedly seeks to improve teacher quality by requiring states to report institutional pass rates on certification exams and denying federal aid to institutions that lose state certification. The result: a decrease in the supply of qualified teachers, especially to working class and minority schools, another excuse for not dealing with what schools need, and a blaming of the female victim, in this case teachers and teacher educators, for school problems rooted elsewhere.
             Title II requires all institutions that prepare teachers to report the "Pass Rates" of their own "Program Completers" on state certification exams to their states. The states in turn are required to report this data annually to the federal government. Although Title II requires institutions to demonstrate that their programs meet standards by reporting their pass rates on certification tests, it does not require states to demonstrate that their tests meet national sta...