April 06, 2001

WKU Teacher Ed Grads
Fare Well On Report Card

Bowling Green, Ky. - If you were to grade Western Kentucky University's Teacher Education program by its graduates, the program would get a high A, according to a nationally-mandated report card.

Western's College of Education and Behavioral Sciences has submitted a report that shows that 96 percent of its teacher education graduates who took the Praxis II assessment test passed. The reporting period covers students graduating in December 1999, May 2000 and August 2000.

The report card is Western's response to Title II of the Higher Education Act, passed by the U.S. Congress in 1998. The act established accountability measures and reporting requirements for institutions and states on teacher preparation and licensing.

Western's report card, due to Kentucky's Standards Board by April 9, shows that it has a solid teacher education program, said Dr. Sam Evans, associate dean of the College of Education and Behavioral Sciences. In fact, Western is doing a little better than the report shows, he said.

Programs with fewer than 10 students taking assessment tests are not reported on the Title II form, Dr. Evans said. If those students are counted, Western's pass rate would climb to 97.01 percent.

"The Praxis II is supposed to assess what we need to be teaching," he said. "We want to make sure the students get what they need to be successful in the classroom."

Western is using a Standards-based Teacher Education Program grant from the Council on Basic Education to look at the core content of its programs as they relate to
assessment tests and as they focus on student learning within a program, Dr. Evans said. "We need to make sure our graduates are making a difference in (grades) P-12 student learning," he said.

Western's success is especially noteworthy given that its service area rates below the national and state average in several key demographic measures related to education, namely average income and percentage of high school and college graduates, said Karen Adams, dean of the College of Education.

"This makes it clear that WKU serves a student population whose families are challenged both in educational and socioeconomic attainment," she said. "Students graduating from Western are often the first in their families to earn a college degree."

Western has designed a program with this unique service area in mind.

"Western's student-centered approach to education, along with a wide selection of student support services, has enabled education students to successfully participate in a college environment," Dr. Adams said. "These students often return to their home communities as educators and become success symbols for the children they teach."

The state has until Oct. 8, 2001, to compile and report the data from all Kentucky schools to the U.S. Department of Education. While the impact of the report cards has been debated, low performing institutions are at risk of losing federal funding, Dr. Evans said. "We're in no danger of that," he said.

In preparing the report card, Dr. Evans said they discovered that almost all of the students who did not pass the Praxis II were transfer students and that all students who did not pass had a composite ACT score of less than 21.

The passing rates of each of the College's programs are available online at http://edtech.tph.wku.edu/9900praxis.html

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