Effective and Ineffective New Teachers

How Effective are Tennessee’s Teacher Preparation Programs? Tennessee’s Value Added Assessment System has been in place since 1995. It enables users to estimate the success of teachers, schools, and districts in lifting student achievement and it does so in a way that permits statistically fair comparisons. Since 2007, the Tennessee Higher Education Commission has published a report card that uses the TVAAS data to estimate success of Tennessee’s teacher preparation programs in graduating “highly effective” new teachers. Highly … Read More

NCTQ 2014 Teacher Prep Review

posted in: Briefings & Reports, Teachers & Teacher Preparation |

How are the nation’s institutions that train tomorrow’s teachers doing? The second edition of NCTQ’s comprehensive Teacher Prep Review has the answers. This edition is one third bigger than last year’s, and features program rankings, so that teacher prep’s consumers can readily know which are the best bets. Click here to read more.

Improved Student Achievement is Not Teaching’s Top Priority

Recent studies have made it clear that significant differences in ability to improve student achievement exist among fully trained and experienced teachers. J. E. Stone’s paper argues that these differences reflect the education community’s view that student achievement is not public education’s highest priority. Rather, achievement is only one valued outcome among many, and it often suffers from inattention. The education community’s priorities are consistent with ideals that have been taught in teacher training programs for decades, but especially since the sixties. They have come … Read More

ECF on Teacher Quality: 2013 and Earlier

Teaching is a highly trained and regulated profession; yet despite all of its rules, standards, enforcement agencies and oversight bodies, the performance of many practicing teachers is so poor as to be detrimental to students.  The reason is that the evaluative process is largely controlled by the profession to suit its own standards—not those of the parents and taxpayers that it serves.  One effect of this self-regulated process is that the public’s priorities are not necessarily those of … Read More

Glossary of Terms and Abbreviations

Glossary of Terms and Abbreviations Used in Tennessee’s Value-Added Assessment Reports   3-Year-Average NCE Gain The average academic gain of the most recent 3 years expressed as an NCE (normal curve equivalent) score. These scores represent the average number of NCE points by which a school exceeds or falls short of the student achievement growth that occurred statewide in 1998-the benchmark year, a.k.a., the Growth Standard. These are the scores on which the Value-Added Achievement Awards are based. … Read More

The National Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education: Whose Standards?

  NCATE’s standards for teacher training programs have been a national standard for the last 25 or so years.  Despite their widespread adoption by states, legislators and state agencies have very little understanding of what those standards mean with respect to the training given teachers.  For example, in their 2000 incarnation, NCATE’s standards required teacher training programs to adopt a “global and multicultural perspective” and a dedication to  “equity, diversity, and social justice.”  See Capturing the Vision: Reflections on … Read More

New Op-Ed by Lisa Keegan and J. E. Stone Asks: “Are Newly Trained Teachers Really Prepared for the Classroom?”

posted in: General Information |

The head of the Education Breakthrough Network and that of the Education Consumers Foundation ask whether children are adequately protected from poorly trained new teachers. A study of Tennessee data shows that up to 1/3 of new teachers are among the least effective in the state and linked to inadequate academic growth in their students. Read it here on The Daily Caller. http://dailycaller.com/2011/01/27/are-newly-trained-teachers-really-prepared-for-the-classroom/ 

FAQ’s About the Value-Added Achievement Awards Program

FAQ’s   What is the Value-Added Achievement Awards program? The Value-Added Achievement Awards are annual awards program that recognize Tennessee’s most effective middle and elementary school principals. These are the leaders whose schools have excelled at raising the academic performance of their students. The program is part of the Education Consumers Foundation’s efforts to make education data clear and understandable to education’s consumers. What is value-added assessment? Value-added assessment is a term taken from economics. It refers not … Read More

Value-Added Achievement Awards Initiative

The Value-Added Achievement Awards and School Performance Charts   Introduction Every citizen has a stake in school quality, especially parents. The purpose of these awards is to make school quality visible to all and to give those who are responsible for producing it the recognition they deserve. All states collect, analyze, and report mountains of school performance data. However, most of this information is not easily accessed or understood by non-educators. Our aim is to strengthen the public’s … Read More

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