JORDAN PATTERSON
Assistant News Editor
After a long process, Fredonia has passed all of the Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation’s (CAEP) standards, becoming the first college to do so in New York.
CAEP, the sole education accreditor in the nation, recently informed Fredonia that they had been officially accredited after qualifying per the organization’s standards.
The five standards include pedagogical knowledge, clinical partnerships, candidate quality, program impact and provider quality, according to CAEP’s website. For the next seven years, Fredonia will be preparing for the next accreditation, and improving upon its Educated Preparation Programs (EPPs).
For Dr. Christine Givner, the dean of the College of Education, it’s all about “growing into the future.”
Starting in 2004, all New York universities with EPPs were subject to national certifications or accreditations. Up until 2013, the accrediting was given by two different groups, NCATE and TEAC.
After a growing sense of political backlash against public education and universities towards their education programs over the last decade, those two organizations wanted to refine their overwatch and improve education nationally. The two groups combined and formed CAEP, the current accreditor of EPPs.
Givner was reluctant to agree with the backlash, but she, among others, saw this as a great opportunity for Fredonia.
“It was a reinvention,” said Givner.
According to Givner, CAEP developed all new standards, and the education field, in general, wanted “to transform Educated Preparation Programs to be the very best that [they] can be.”
Universities that were transitioning from the old standards to the new ones were given three options. The first and second options were that they could stick with NCATE or TEAC’s standards through the next accreditation. The third option was to embrace the new CAEP standards.
Up for accreditation in 2015, the University, after an unanimous vote among the Professional Education Council at Fredonia, decided in 2013 that they would run with the new CAEP standards.
“We decided that we would be bold and be pioneers in terms of taking on the new CAEP standards and become an early adopter,” Givner said.
Electing to become an early adopter meant that the 29 education programs, undergraduate and graduate, would have to change their methods to meet the brand new regulations.
Without any guidance documents or any structure to follow, the University went in blind and prepared for over two years.
“It was kind of like a moving target,” Givner said, referring to keeping up with CAEP standards as they evolved over the last three years. Over the course of Fredonia’s preparation period, CAEP started with just three standards and ended with five.
Givner was also aware that other universities nation-wide that chose to be earlier adopters were dropping out. According to her, the CAEP office called Fredonia to encourage them to stick with them because “more than half of [the early adopters] had dropped out.”
Over the last three years, Fredonia had to report back CAEP with formal reports even before the CAEP team assigned to Fredonia could visit the campus.
In September 2015, that team finally arrived on campus. After a great visit and a pat on the back per se, they left and Fredonia had to wait for its official accreditation.
Soon enough, the University would hear back and was informed that it had passed all five standards, making Fredonia the first in New York and one of the first in the U.S. to do so.
“To be an early adopter, I think it demonstrates that we have faculty and staff who really are experts in their field,” Givner said.
President Virginia Horvath shared similar sentiments and agreed that this certification can be useful to attract potential education majors.
“It’s important because it gives us certain credentials to all the teachers who graduate from that program,” said Horvath. “The fact that we came through that review with no issues, no problems and only accolades for our program is really a credit to our College of Education.”