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As we enter the twenty-first century, the outcomes, consequences, and results of teacher education have become critical topics in nearly all of the state and national policy debates about teacher preparation and licensure as well as in the development of many of the privately and publicly funded research agendas related to teacher and student learning. In this article, I argue that teacher education reform over the last fifty years has been driven by a series of questions about policy and practice. The question that is currently driving reform and policy in teacher education is what I refer to as "the outcomes question." This question asks how we should conceptualize and define the outcomes of teacher education for teacher learning, professional practice, and student learning, as well as how, by whom, and for what purposes these outcomes should be documented, demonstrated, and/or measured. In this article, I suggest that the outcomes question in teacher education is being conceptualized and constructed in quite different ways depending on the policy, research, and practice contexts in which the question is posed as well as on the political and professional motives of the posers. The article begins with an overview of the policy context, including those reforms and initiatives that have most influenced how outcomes are currently being constructed, debated, and enacted in teacher education. Then I identify and analyze three major "takes" on the outcomes question in teacher education—outcomes as the long-term or general impacts of teacher education, outcomes as teacher candidates' scores on high stakes teacher tests, and outcomes as the professional performances of teacher candidates, particularly their demonstrated ability to influence student learning. For each of these approaches to outcomes, I examine underlying assumptions about teaching and schooling, the evidence and criteria used for evaluation, units of analysis, and consequences for the profession. I point out that how we construct outcomes in teacher education (including how we make the case that some outcomes matter more than others) legitimizes but also undermines particular points of view about the purposes of schooling, the nature of teaching and learning, and the role of teacher education in educational reform. In the second half of the article, I offer critique across the three constructions of outcomes, exploring the possibilities as well as the pitfalls involved in the outcomes debate. In this section, I focus on the tensions between professional consensus and critique, problems with the inputs-outputs metaphor, the need to get social justice onto the outcomes agenda, problems with the characterization of teachers as either saviors or culprits, and the connection of outcomes to educational reform strategies that are either democratic or market-driven.

There are many controversies related to the increasingly widespread theme of "social justice" in teacher education, including debates about whether and/or how promoting pupils' learning is part of this theme. This article briefly discusses the concept of teacher education for social justice in terms of pupils' learning and then considers this notion in terms of the current press to hold teacher education accountable for learning. The article then presents the results of the "Teacher Assessment/Pupil Learning" (TAPL) study, an analysis nested inside a larger qualitative study about learning to teach over time in a preparation program with a stated social justice agenda. The purpose of the TAPL analysis was to evaluate the outcomes of teacher education for social justice by assessing the intellectual quality of assessments created or used by teacher candidates during the student teaching period and also to assess the quality of their pupils' responses to those assessments. The project used Newmann and Associates' (1996) framework of "authentic intellectual work" and the scoring system that emerged from that framework because of their general consistency with the idea of social justice. Drawing on scored examples of teacher candidates' assessments and pupils' work samples, the article shows that many teacher candidates created cognitively complex and authentic learning opportunities for their pupils and that when pupils had more complex classroom assignments, they produced higher quality work. The article concludes that although it is complex, it is possible to construct teacher education assessments, such as the TAPL, that focus on pupil learning outcomes in ways that are consistent with social justice, especially preparation for a democratic society.

Teacher preparation has emerged as an acutely politicized and publicized issue in U.S. education policy and practice, and there have been fierce debates about the methods and reasoning behind it. Because of the importance of teachers and teacher education, policy should be driven by the best evidence based on high-quality research. In Holding Teacher Preparation Accountable: A Review of Claims and Evidence, four major national initiatives intended to improve teacher quality by "holding teacher education accountable" for arrangements and outcomes are explored. This policy brief scrutinizes each initiative in light of the research evidence.