NEXT STEPS: THE TEACHING QUALITY DATA SYSTEMS ROADMAP

Increased Focus on Teachers & Teacher Preparation The Impact of No Child Left Behind Responding to No Child Left Behind The Call for New TQ Data Systems Next Steps: The Teaching Quality Data System Roadmap

In order for states to respond to these factors, guidance will be necessary to create and build these comprehensive TQ data systems. During our early work in this arena, it was painfully obvious that states quite simply lacked the basic infrastructure to effectively and systematically collect the relevant TQ data. The Center’s roadmap, outlined on this Web site, is designed to guide state policy leaders and professional staff from K-12 and higher education agencies, particularly with the TNE data demands in mind. 

Any TQ system, however, must meet high standards for both accuracy and usefulness. Creating a TQ data warehouse with data that are inaccurate, incomplete, incompatible with other data sources, or inaccessible to teacher preparation programs and researchers is a waste of time and money.

This roadmap outlines the necessary components of the system for state policy leaders, university administrators and faculty, and technical data staff from education agencies. The roadmap highlights critical barriers identified throughout our current work—privacy, interagency data sharing, and database integration—and provides specific demonstrations from Louisiana’s cutting-edge state TQ data systems as well as the work of many states, such as California, that despite limited resources are attempting to assemble solid data on teachers and teacher education programs.

The Center can help states, no matter where they are in the process, to tackle these data issues and begin to build systems that can work within and across states to answer critical TQ questions.

Last updated: February 6, 2006