NEW RESEARCH TOOLS

New Philanthropy New Research Tools New School Adequacy Lawsuits

Second, several new tools and research methodologies are emerging that can help the education community begin to assemble better data on teacher education—both traditional and alternative—and on teaching. We are sanguine about the prospects of using value-added student achievement data for use as one measure of teacher effectiveness and informing the efficacy of teacher education, alternative certification programs, and the impact of teacher licensing and advanced certification. With the cutting-edge research of Dan Goldhaber in his efforts to assess the links between National Board Certified Teachers (NBCT) and student achievement gains in North Carolina, we now have a greater understanding of how school districts and states can develop more powerful and useful TQ data systems in the region. Over3 years, Goldhaber had to develop a new data system from North Carolina state agencies and school districts in order to conduct his analyses, which showed that NBCT positively impact student achievement gains. His knowledge will be invaluable in crafting new approaches to building TQ infrastructures.

In addition to the tools of value-added assessments, more national attention is beginning to focus on teacher education effects, with the National Council of the Accreditation of Teacher Education urging colleges and universities to provide hard evidence that their teacher education programs improve teaching and positively affect student learning. With NCATE’s performance-based standards in place, teacher education programs increasingly are reporting systematically on admission assessments of teacher candidates, student work produced by their teacher interns, state licensure tests, and follow-up studies of their graduates. While individual institutions are not yet producing evidence that could be aggregated across programs and universities as well as states, new tools and technologies are being developed that deserve replication. Emporia State in Kansas and Winthrop University in South Carolina are good examples of how to assemble performance data according NCATE standards and framework. While we strongly believe that value-added methodologies (VAMs) can be extremely useful in improving teaching and teacher education, we also believe that caution must be taken in utilizing such an approach.

In addition, Jim Wyckoff and colleagues are mining and combining state and local databases in New York and administering a range of new teacher surveys in order to identify specific aspects of teacher education (traditional and alternative) that are critical both for increasing teacher effectiveness in the classroom and for increasing the supply of teachers for high-need schools. These researchers have developed innovative ways to access and merge (often controversial) data and assemble much-needed information on the context of both preparation and teaching in order to find effects of teacher education on student learning.

As both Goldhaber and Wyckoff will attest, assembling such data is extremely time consuming and expensive—clearly outside the realm of any teacher preparation program in the country. This clearly underscores the need for the development of statewide databases that would allow more access to such useful data.

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Last updated: February 21, 2006