Grading the teachers’ teachers

Posted by on May 13, 2013

Grading the teachers’ teachers

Scores of teacher-training programs across the country will soon be evaluated based on the test scores of their graduates’ students, reports Sarah Carr in The Hechinger Report. Louisiana’s experience speaks to both the “promise and peril” of this approach, writes Carr. For instance, these analyses only use data from institutions with a large enough cohort of graduates (25 in a given subject area) for results to be statistically valid; not a single New Orleans-based teacher-training program is therefore included in the evaluations. Even when a cohort size is adequate, the data can be simplistic or misleading. Do low reading scores, measured years after a group of teachers enters the classroom, mean their training program had a bad curriculum or weak instructors? Or did it admit weaker candidates from the start? Or send them off to schools with less supportive principals? Using a value-added analysis, Louisiana researchers gauge growth in individual students regardless of starting point, then compare overall student growth in the classrooms of graduates from different training programs with growth produced by veteran educators. Louisiana embarked on its analysis over a decade ago in an effort to weed out the state’s weakest teacher-training programs, and programs consistently rated low can be shut down. To date, no program has shuttered as a result of assessment.

http://hechingerreport.org/content/grading-the-teachers-teachers_11939/