The Making of a Teacher
A Report on Teacher Preparation in the U.S.

by C. Emily Feistritzer

Copyright © 2003 by the Center for Education Information.
All rights reserved.

METHODOLOGY

The Center for Education Information (CEI) conducted a mail survey of all Institutions of Higher Education (IHE) which had a Teacher Preparation Program. In order to identify the universe, CEI acquired lists from several sources. A list of institutions was obtained from the 1998-99 Market Data Retrieval (MDR) directory of Institutions of Higher Education purported to have a school, college or department of education. MDR generates its list by calling every postsecondary institution in the nation and asking if it has a school, college or department of education. MDR\rquote s list had 1,452 such institutions.

A list was also acquired from the Higher Education Directory compiled by Higher Education Publications, Inc. This list had 1,274 institutions purported to have teacher training programs.

A list of IHEs that grant education degrees was obtained from the National Center for Education Statistics. This list had 1,281 IHEs on it.

The 1998-99 National Association of State Directors of Teacher Education and Certification (NASDTEC) Manual of the Preparation and Certification of Educational Personnel listed 1,363 approved teacher education institutions.

NCEI, in its annual update of the publication, ALTERNATIVE TEACHER CERTIFICATION: A State-by-State Analysis, asks the states to list all of the IHEs in their state that have a program for the preparation of teachers. The 1998-99 edition of that publication listed 1,348 such institutions.

A comparison of all five of these lists revealed numerous discrepancies, for example,

ALTERNATIVE TEACHER CERTIFICATION: A State-by-State Analysis (ATC) had 135 schools that weren't in the MDR list.

The MDR list had 263 schools that were not in the ATC book

The Department of Education had 79 schools which were not in the MDR list or the ATC book.

The Secondary Education schools provided addresses for 86 schools from the ATC and 68 schools from the Department of Education.

The HED had 109 schools that were not in the ATC book.

The ATC had 187 schools that were not on the HED list.

The ATC had 53 schools that were not on the NASDEC list.

The NASDEC list had 45 schools that were not in the ATC book.

The Center for Education Information decided to mail the questionnaires to a list of institutions that represented all of the IHEs that showed up on any of the five lists.

A 36-item questionnaire designed to collect baseline information on the programs for the initial preparation of teachers was mailed April 12-13, 1999 to deans or directors of teacher education at 1,450 postsecondary institutions in the United States that had been identified as having a school, college or department of education.

When several questionnaires were returned indicating that their institution did not have a program for the preparation of teachers, CEI began generating its own list of all the Institutions of Higher Education that have Teacher Preparation Programs by contacting each states office of teacher education and certification and asking for a list of all the Institutions of Higher Education in each state that had a program for the initial preparation of teachers. NCEI also asked for names of the deans and/or directors of teacher education, and their addresses and phone numbers at each of these institutions. This effort generated the final and complete list of 1,354 Institutions of Higher Education that have programs for the initial preparation of teachers. IHEs that had been identified as having a school, college or department of education but were not on the list of IHEs submitted by the states as having a program for the initial preparation of teachers were considered out-of-scope and were not included in the second mailing, May 28-29, 1999.

By September 1, 674 Institutions of Higher Education had responded, for an overall response rate of 50 percent. Four IHEs sent the questionnaire back blank. Five IHEs answered the first three questions, then stopped filling out the questionnaire. Completed questionnaires were returned by 665 IHEs.

The response rate for IHEs by institutional enrollment size is calculated as follows:

Enrollment Size	Total	Number of Respondents	Response Rate
10K+	243	142	58%
5-10K	227	102	45%
1-5K	662	319	48%
<1K	222	102	46%
Total	1,354	665	49%

The highest response rate was in the largest enrollment category. This suggests that the coverage of those enrolled, admitted and graduated from Teacher Preparation Programs is greater than the institutional response rate.

In some of the tables and in the text, estimates were made to the universe of all institutions offering Teacher Preparation Programs. The methodology for doing this was to inflate the totals in the enrollment size categories by the inverse of the response rate for that category. For example, if the response rate in the more than ten thousand enrollment size category was 80% and the total response for an item was 100, then the estimated total for this category is 125 (100/.80). The overall total was then found by summing over the enrollment size categories.

The estimates derived by this methodology appear to be reasonable. The number of teacher education graduates for 1998 estimated is close to NCES estimates, which were derived independently.

In comparing two sample percentages, the difference in sample proportions necessary to be considered statistically significant is dependent on the subgroup sample sizes and the actual value of the two sample proportions. For purposes of this survey, the table below shows the minimum differences between two sample percentages required for significance at the 90 percent confidence level according to subgroup size. To illustrate the interpretation of these numbers, consider two subgroups of 300 and 500, respectively. The table indicates that the smallest percentage difference between the two sample subgroups for that difference to be significant, with 90 percent confidence, is 6.0 percent. In other words, if 52 percent of IHEs in a 300-member subgroup answered "yes" to a question while only 48 percent of those in a 500-member subgroup gave that answer, the difference of 4 percent is not statistically significant, i.e., the difference could be attributed to chance and not to an actual difference in the two populations.

Minimum Differences Required for Significance (90 Percent Confidence Level) Between Sample Subgroups
	Size of other subgroup
Size of one subgroup	100	200	300	400	500	600	700
100	11.6	10.1	9.5	9.2	9.0	8.9	8.8
200	10.1	8.2	7.5	7.1	6.9	6.7	6.6
300	9.5	7.5	6.7	6.3	6.0	5.8	5.7
400	9.2	7.1	6.3	5.8	5.5	5.3	5.2
500	9.0	6.9	6.0	5.5	5.2	5.0	4.8
600	8.9	6.7	5.8	5.3	5.0	4.7	4.6
700	8.8	6.6	5.7	5.2	4.8	4.6	4.4
NOTE: For a further discussion of the standard error of the difference between two proportions see D.E. Hinkle, W. Wiersma, and S.G. Jurs, Applied Statistics for the Behavioral Sciences (Houghton Mifflin Company: Boston, 1988), 267-270.