Reclaiming Accountability in Teacher Education

by Marilyn Cochran-Smith, Molly Cummings Carney (With), Elizabeth Stringer Keefe (Screenplay)

Winner of the 2019 Society of Professors of Education Outstanding Book Award Winner of 2018 AESA Critic’s Choice Award Teacher accountability has been a major strategy for “fixing” education for the last 2 decades. In this book, Cochran-Smith and her research team argue that it is time for teacher educators to reclaim accountability by adopting a new approach that features intelligent professional responsibility, challenges the structures and processes that reproduce inequity, and sustains multi-layered collaboration with diverse communities. The authors analyze and critique major accountability initiatives, including Department of Education regulations, CAEP accreditation procedures, NCTQ teacher preparation reviews, and edTPA, and expose the lack of evidence behind these policies, as well as the negative impact they are having on teacher education. However, the book does not conclude that accountability is the wrong direction for the next generation of teacher education. Instead, the authors offer a clear and achievable vision of accountability for teacher education based on a commitment to equity and democracy. Book

240 pages, Hardcover

Published April 20, 2018

About the author

Marilyn Cochran-Smith is the John E. Cawthorne Professor of Teacher Education for Urban Schools at the Lynch School of Education, Boston College, where she served as Director of the PhD Program in Curriculum & Instruction from 1996-2017. Cochran-Smith is widely known for her work about teacher education research, practice and policy and for her sustained commitment to teacher education for social justice with inquiry as the centerpiece. She is a frequent presenter nationally and internationally.

Dr. Cochran-Smith and the BC research group, Project TEER (Teacher Education and Education Reform), will publish Reclaiming Accountability in Teacher Education (Teachers College Press) in April, 2018. Cochran-Smith has written nine other books, five of which have won national awards, and more than 200 articles, chapters, and editorials related to teacher education. She is a founding co-editor of the Teachers College Press book series on Practitioner Inquiry, which has published more than 50 books about practitioner inquiry or by teachers and other education practitioners.

Dr. Cochran-Smith is the Principal Investigator for a Spencer Foundation-funded study of teacher education at new graduate schools of education (nGSEs) in the U.S. She is co-founder of Project RITE (Rethinking Initial Teacher Education for Equity), a two-country research project at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. She is also the Chair of the International Advisory Panel on Teacher Education for NOKUT, Norway’s government agency for Quality Assurance in Higher Education.

Cochran-Smith is a past president of the American Educational Research Association, an inaugural AERA fellow, and a member of the National Academy of Education. She has received many awards, including AERA’s Research to Practice Award, the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Literacy Research Association, the Carl Grant Research Award from the National Association of Multicultural Education, and all of the major awards from the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education (AACTE), including the David G. Imig Award for Achievement in Teacher Education, the Margaret B. Lindsey Award for Research in Teacher Education, and the Edward C. Pomeroy Award for Outstanding Contributions to Teacher Education.