U.s. Teacher Training Programs Nationwide Identification System

At the beginning of the 21st century, the reforms of teacher education in our country are entering a new development stage that the teacher preparation system is changing from a close and directional type to an open and non-directional type. This means competition will come out among the various levels of professional education units in our country. Teacher markets will be opened completely to the students graduating not only from professional education units but also from non-professional education units. It requires that our governments establish a complete system of teacher education, including the accreditation of the professional education units and teacher preparation programs, teacher qualifications & certificates etc., which will ensure and monitor the teacher education qualities. Recently, our country has taken the measure of teacher qualifications & certificates, but has not yet established the accreditation system of professional education units and teacher preparation programs. So the research of the accreditation system is a new issue in our teacher education reforms.Meanwhile, America has already had better practical experiences and theories in the accreditation system of professional education units and teacher preparation programs. The paper focuses on the American accreditation system of teacher education programs that NCATE (the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education) has carried out. It is expected to find out American experiences through comparative view and enlighten us in building a proper accreditation system of teacher education.The general structure of this paper is composed three main parts. The first part introduces and analyzes NCATE's organizational structure, the standards & procedures of teacher education programs accreditation, the basis of the accreditation: the self-evaluation system of teacher education programs and so on. The second part reflects on and generalizes the historical effect, actual influence, effective experiences and existing problems in NCATE's accreditation of teacher education programs. The third part gives some suggestions in our policies of teacher education system.The whole paper is divided into six chapters.Chapter One introduces the American organization for accreditation of teacher preparation programs, including its historical trace, background of set-up, goals and tasks, structure and function, and its relationship with other organizations of teacher education evaluation.Chapter Two introduces and analyzes the standards of NCATE's accreditation of teacher preparation programs. This part mostly analyzes the characters and bases of "performance-based" standards.Chapter Three describes the procedures of NCATE's accreditation of teacher preparation programs, which is to study how NCATE operates accreditation of teacher preparation programs.Chapter Four analyzes the bases of NCATE's accreditation system-the self-evaluation system of teacher preparation programs, exploring how NCATEguides the teacher education units in building the self-evaluation systems for the recognition from NCATE.Chapter Five reflects on and generalizes the historical effects, actual influences, effective experiences and the existing problems in NCATE's accreditation of teacher preparation programs, being used as base of comparative research.Chapter Six gives some suggestions, based on NCATE's experiences, for our teacher preparation system.