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TEACHERS & STUDENTS - INTRODUCTION
Let’s be clear: Good teachers are those who help student learn. Moreover, the purpose of teacher preparation programs, both traditional and alternative, is to graduate teachers who enter schools and stay long enough to help students learn on both standardized tests and other forms of assessments.
Thanks to the path-breaking work of a number of researchers like William Sanders, many policymakers are calling on states, universities, and school districts to use new valued-added methods (VAM) to assess both teachers and the programs that prepare them. VAM draws on new statistical techniques that use multiple years of student achievement data to estimate the effects of schools or teachers. By tracking individual students’ academic growth over several years and different subjects, researchers can estimate the contributions that teachers make to that growth. A number of studies using these methods have surfaced, with stunning results. For example, one of Sanders’s earlier studies found that students assigned to the most effective teachers for 3 years in a row performed 50 percentile points higher than comparable students assigned to the least effective teachers for 3 years in a row.
One of the most important applications of VAM to date is emerging in Louisiana, where the state’s Board of Regents, under the leadership of Jeanne Burns (Associate Commissioner for Teacher Education Initiatives) and LSU researcher, George Noell, has been testing the use of a new Value-Added Teacher Preparation Program Assessment Model that has the “capacity to examine the growth of achievement of children and link growth in student learning to teacher preparation programs.” The state has been developing a comprehensive teacher quality (TQ) data system to enable tracking teacher education graduates and determining how long they stay in teaching and where they go if they leave. Further, using a specially designed VAM helps determine how effective the state’s teacher preparation (both traditional and alternative) programs are in helping increase student achievement.
Dan Goldhaber, a well-known and accomplished economist who has conducted a wide range of VAM studies, reveals how difficult it is to work with existing state data bases and what researchers must do if they seek to conduct both valid and reliable analyses. His description of his National Board Certified Teacher study in North Carolina proves to be a valuable case study and offers many lessons that need to be learned.
We believe strongly with the idea that VAM models can help focus attention on TQ and teacher education where it belongs: on increasing student learning. Yet, although the prospect of objectively quantifying teacher effectiveness based on an analysis of student test score gains is an important advancement, highly respected researchers have “revealed a number of serious concerns” about using the method solely to judge individual teachers and teacher education programs.
Click on the above links to read about Questions, Indicators, Using Data, Barriers and Lessons Learned.