NEW PHILANTHROPY

New Philanthropy New Research Tools New School Adequacy Lawsuits

First of all, and most prominently, the Carnegie Corporation of New York’s Teachers for a New Era (TNE) has propelled teacher preparation quality issues to the forefront of the following 11 institutions of higher education: Bank Street College of Education in New York City, Boston College, California State University at Northridge, the University of Connecticut, Florida A&M University, Michigan State University, Stanford University, The University of Texas at El Paso, the University of Virginia, the University of Washington, and the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee. As part of the initiative, these institutions will need to use student achievement data to demonstrate the effectiveness of their graduates. However, as part of our initial efforts with three of these institutions—Bank Street College, the University of Virginia, and California State University at Northridge—we have come to realize how problematic this task is for TNE sites. These universities are unable to track graduates, even those teaching in the state in which the university resides, let alone those who go to a different state or do not enter the profession. Universities have had few, if any, mechanisms to follow these new teachers and to document how long they stay, and if they do, under what conditions. Moreover, many of these universities have had little capacity to accurately match these novices to performance records of the students they teach. 

However, with support from Carnegie, new tools are being developed to track graduates, mentor them virtually, and collect evidence on their impact on student learning. Some are using standardized test scores, while others are using curriculum-embedded assessment of graduates and pupils. [Stanford University and Bank Street College]. Two major teacher education organizations, the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education (AACTE) and American Association of State Colleges and Universities (AASCU), are now launching efforts to assist their member universities and teacher education programs to more aggressively collect evidence on the effects of their programs with respect to new teacher retention and student achievement.

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Last updated: February 21, 2006