An external panel that includes several prominent critics of teacher education has been tapped to craft the performance standards for the Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation (CAEP), the new organization's leaders announced last week. Among the standards under consideration: how programs ensure that candidates know their content; the programs' ability to recruit an academically strong pool of candidates; their success in training teachers to use assessment data effectively; and the performance of their graduates in classrooms. CAEP was created in late 2010 by the merger of two separate accreditors, the Teacher Education Accreditation Council (TEAC), and the far larger and older National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE). Both will operate until the merger is completed by the end of this year. The commission tapped to write the new body's standards will be chaired by Camilla Benbow, the dean of education and human development at Vanderbilt University, and Gene Harris, the superintendent of the Columbus, Ohio, public schools. Drafting the new measures is, in any event, not likely to be an easy task. One of the major challenges could well be the specificity of any new set of performance standards, especially given the general lack of solid research evidence linking any one teacher-preparation approach to effective teaching.