Huston-Tillotson educator prep program loses accreditation

The Texas Education Agency and State Board for Educator Certification sought to revoke the accreditation of the educator preparation program at Huston-Tillotson University because it had been assigned an accreditation status of Accredited-Probation for three years. TEA and SBEC also sought to revoke HTU's ability to offer the certification for Core Subjects EC-6 because HTU failed to meet the performance standard on the content pedagogy tests for this certificate for three consecutive years. HTU opposed the revocations and requested a hearing before the State Office of Administrative Hearings.

SBEC is responsible for conducting annual reviews of educator preparation programs and recommending an accreditation status for each one. HTU is a small educator preparation program that enrolls about 100 students in traditional full-time programs, alternative teacher certification programs and an adult evening program.

During the hearing, evidence was introduced to show that in November 2022, the director of HTU's educator preparation program received notice that TEA was recommending a status of "Accredited-Probation" for the program for the 2021-22 academic year. The director failed to disclose the program's status to other members of the HTU administrative team until January 2024, when the "Accredited-Probation" status was recommended for a second year.

Upon discovery of the program's status, the HTU administration took several corrective actions, including hiring a part-time consultant, identifying how HTU's educator preparation students were approved for testing, updating the curriculum, offering test preparation workshops, reviving an advisory committee, hiring a certification coordinator to assist students to meet certification requirements and developing an educator preparation program standing committee. The HTU administrative team also focused on improving certification examination outcomes for students by ensuring that students were placed into courses in the correct sequence. The administrative team also increased the threshold required for practice tests prior to approval for students to take the certification examination.

In November 2024, HTU was informed that TEA was recommending an accreditation status of "Accredited-Probation" for the third consecutive year. In February 2025, TEA notified the program that it was being recommended for a "Not Accredited-Revoked" status based on the fact that the program had received an "Accredited-Probation" status for three consecutive years.

HTU did not dispute the accreditation analysis or the underlying data that supported the "Not Accredited-Revoked" status. Rather, it argued that those scores were caused by outside events, including the pandemic, changes to how accreditation scores were calculated and the lack of oversight by the program's director. HTU argued that the purpose of the "Accredited-Probation" status is to allow remediation and that it had taken significant steps to address underlying issues; however, given the initial lack of knowledge regarding the program's probationary status, there was not enough time for HTU to bring its program into compliance with standards.

After consideration of the facts and the available evidence, the administrative law judge concluded that although HTU made diligent efforts to remediate the deficiencies identified by the accreditation review, those efforts were insufficient to timely correct the issues. HTU did not identify a legal basis that allowed discretion when an educator preparation program did not demonstrate improvement after three years with an "Accredited-Probation" status. Therefore, the administrative law judge recommended that the program's accreditation be revoked.

The administrative law judge's recommendation was presented to SBEC at its April 24 meeting. Amid much deliberation, a new motion was proposed to allow HTU to remain on Accredited-Probation status for one additional year and be appointed a conservator. That motion failed, then SBEC members voted 5-2 to revoke HTU's accreditation.