Are Teachers In Nevada Held Accountable For Student Learning

Measuring how ed schools teach teachers.

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Should schools of education be held accountable for producing teachers who tin can raise their students' achievement?

This week the U.S. Education Department said, emphatically, yes. The new guidelines for teacher-prep programs are arguably the strictest federal accountability rules in all of college ed.

They have teeth: Depression-performing programs volition be in danger of losing access to federal TEACH grants, which pay for teachers to enter fields of high need in high-poverty schools.

And they are raising controversy.

Under the new rules, states will accept to rate programs equally "constructive," "at-risk" or "low-performing," based on 4 areas:

1) The Fundamentals. The kickoff sounds similar traditional accreditation boilerplate: "assurances that the programme ... graduates candidates with content ... pedagogical cognition, and quality clinical preparation." Basically, brand certain the teachers know their subjects and know how to teach.

But for each program, whether based at a university, an alternative prep program similar Teach for America, or online, states are also being asked to collect and publish:

2) Job placement and retention rates of new graduates, including in high-need schools;

three) Feedback: Customer satisfaction-style surveys of graduates and their employers;

And most controversially:

4) Outcomes: the "learning outcomes" of students taught past the new graduates of each teacher program in their outset three years in the classroom.

Simply for comparison, imagine that police force schools were rated by states based on the percentage of their graduates' clients who won their cases in the first three years. Or imagine medical schools required to report the vital statistics of the patients of their newly-minted doctors.

Information technology's an interesting move, since the Every Student Succeeds Act, the new federal education police, went the other way: releasing states from their obligation to evaluate teachers based on student test scores.

They had been encouraged to do so using a controversial method sometimes chosen "value-added modeling." The method has been criticized equally statistically hard to apply, especially to teachers placed in low-performing schools.

These new instructor-prep program rules don't require states use tests per se to measure out "learning outcomes," simply they don't specify easy alternatives, either.

The heads of the national teachers' unions were united in opposition.

"Using students' test scores to evaluate educators takes us dorsum to the failed No Child Left Behind days," Lily Eskelsen Garcia, president of the National Educational activity Association, said in a statement.

Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, phrased her statement more broadly: "Information technology is, quite but, ludicrous to propose evaluating teacher preparation programs based on the functioning of the students taught by a program's graduates."

Back up for the new rules came from Arthur Levine, president of the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, and a onetime president of Teachers Higher, Columbia University. "I remember what's really nice about them is they set up a quality floor, and hold both traditional and nontraditional programs to the aforementioned standards."

He acknowledges that achievement scores are "express" and "no panacea;" that information technology's hard to judge a physics or music instructor based on student functioning on Common Core-aligned math and reading tests.

Nevertheless, Levine adds, "We should make every bit much use as we can of that data. ... The reality is that the most of import measure out of whether a teacher is successful is, Did the students learn?"