We hear many questions these days about whether teacher preparation programs are doing an effective job of graduating teachers who can help students achieve. Even U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has accused schools of education of doing a mediocre job.

The two states with the most experience using such data, Louisiana and Tennessee, have shown that it can be a powerful catalyst for change. Both can point to programs that have seen improvements in value-added scores after altering aspects of their programming. Nevertheless, teacher-educators and state officials alike continue to wrestle with how best to translate what are, in essence, fairly blunt measures of program effectiveness into a regular cycle for improving teacher education curricula.

Forzani, who helped revamp the University of Michigan’s teacher education curriculum, is now the associate director of TeachingWorks. The new university-led program aims to develop the first set of widely used national standards for producing competent new teachers, something many training programs now fail to do.

The average scores of graduating teacher-candidates on state-required licensing exams are uniformly higher, often significantly, than the passing scores states set for such exams, according to an Education Week analysis of preliminary data from a half-dozen states.

Policymakers should work to hold teacher colleges accountable for preparing effective educators and speed up the implementation of rigorous, uniform state standards, says a report released last week by the White House Jobs Council, a group of business and labor leaders and academics tasked with making long-term recommendations to improve the nation's economic future.

But while the report counts Yale-Singapore, it does not include Vanderbilt University’s proposed teacher-training facility in Abu Dhabi, where Vanderbilt will design the program and Abu Dhabi will bear the costs. The proposed school would be independently accredited, and Vanderbilt has explicitly said it will not be a branch campus.

In initial discussions that raised more questions than answers, the negotiators debated the utility of various proposals for new reporting, sought to reconcile the decade-old reporting system with a host of new developments in teacher education, and, ultimately, sparred over whether the Education Department's proposals for the overhaul bump against the limits of its regulatory authority.
The requirements, outlined in Title II of the Higher Education Act, compel both states and teacher-preparation programs to produce report cards with information on certification, licensure-test results, and candidate numbers. States must also identify annually which of their teacher-training programs are "at risk" or "low performing."

This June, the American Museum of Natural History will introduce its first Master of Arts in teaching program, in which students with a background, if not a career, in science can spend 15 months learning to become earth science teachers.

Days ago, three economists released a study that created a great deal of controversy. Raj Chetty and John N. Friedman of Harvard University and Jonah Rockoff of Columbia University studied the school records and income tax records of 2.5 million students in a major urban district (probably New York City) over a 20-year period. They concluded that good teachers cause students to get higher test scores, which lead in turn to higher lifetime earnings, fewer teen pregnancies, and higher college-going rates.

A sure-to-be-controversial new study from the National Council on Teacher Quality – the same group that developed the heavily criticized methodology U.S. News & World Report will use for its new teacher education program rankings -- determined that fully three-fourths of student teaching programs, including ones at top education programs like Vanderbilt and New York Universities, are inadequate.

The Interstate Teacher Assessment and Support Consortium, a body of educators, teacher-educators, and state officials organized by the Council of Chief State School Officers here in Washington, has just finalized a revision of the Model Core Teaching Standards.

Numerous education school deans have protested that the ratings program’s methodology is flawed since the program was announced last month. In a letter last week, officials from 35 leading education colleges and graduate schools — including Columbia, Harvard, Michigan State and Vanderbilt — denounced an “implied coercion” if they do not cooperate with the ratings.

The Tennessee State Board of Education recently released data
showing that teachers trained by Teach For America (TFA) are getting better test scores out of their students than nearly every college of education in the state (the only exception: math teachers from Vanderbilt University).

NCTQ, U.S. News Announce Joint Teacher Education Review via @educationweek

Graduates of Vanderbilt's storied Peabody education college also scored well on the state report card, registering the best math scores in the state.

A unique collaboration among public and private universities in Tennessee, state government and national educational entities is working to develop a reliable measure of novice teacher instructional practice as part of a national movement to improve teacher performance.

The newly formed Teaching Performance Assessment Consortium of Tennessee (TPAC-TN) is a partnership among the state Department of Education, the Tennessee Board of Regents, the University of Tennessee, the University of Memphis and Vanderbilt’s Peabody College.

The most effective new teachers in Tennessee are being trained by Teach for America, not colleges of education, with the exception of math teachers from Vanderbilt University.

Some teachers may receive training through the Treatment and Research Institute for Autism Spectrum Disorders at the Vanderbilt Kennedy Center. Other school systems provide in-house training and support for teachers.

Teacher preparation needs to be organized in such a way that student-teaching and other "clinical" experiences in schools are prioritized, with coursework and other requirements embedded in and supplementing the on-the-job work, according to a report issued this morning by a high-powered panel of teacher-educators, teacher-quality experts, policymakers, and practitioners.

In Tennessee, Vanderbilt University, University of Memphis, East Tennessee State University, Middle Tennessee State University, Tennessee State University, Tennessee Tech University, Austin Peay State University and University of Tennessee-Knoxville are piloting the new assessments.

The governing boards of NCATE and TEAC approved the merger plans unanimously at a joint meeting held Oct. 22. Under the plans, NCATE and TEAC would be subsumed into the new organization, dubbed the Council for Accreditation of Educator Preparation, within two years.

Countries with the best-performing school systems largely recruit teachers from the top third of high school and college graduates, while the United States has difficulty attracting its top students to the profession, a new report finds.
With more than half of all American teachers today becoming eligible for retirement in the next 10 years, however, the country has a “rare window of opportunity to shape the next generation of teachers,” Byron Auguste, Paul Kihn, and Matt Miller write in the report for the Washington-based management-consulting firm McKinsey & Co.

Education programs across 19 states are piloting a performance-based assessment for teacher-candidates that potentially could serve as a common prelicensing measure for new teachers.
Based on a test in use in about 30 education schools in California, the Teacher Performance Assessment includes a “teaching event” requiring teachers to extensively document and submit for review artifacts of their planning, instruction, and ability to assess and respond to student needs.
Five of the states taking part in the work—Massachusetts, Minnesota, Ohio, Tennessee, and Washington—have committed in legislation to use a performance-based licensing test, and officials have signed memoranda of understanding agreeing to adopt the assessment if it proves to be technically valid and reliable.

A Texas teaching initiative is at the forefront of President Barack Obama's plans to vastly increase the number of science and math teachers in the U.S. over the next several years. UTeach, started at the University of Texas at Austin in 1997, is a program that allows college students to earn a teaching certificate while pursuing math and science majors. The program has spread across the country, and Obama endorsed it last week as one of five public-private partnerships that will advance a goal of training thousands of new teachers.

Florida already grades its public schools and rates its pre-kindergarten programs based on student test scores. Its teacher-preparation programs look to be next. The Florida Department of Education is working on a system to judge programs that train teachers — whether at universities, colleges or school districts — in an effort to boost teacher quality.

Math and science teachers in Michigan will be eligible for stipends to pay for their master's degree training if they commit to working in high-need schools, thanks to a new project backed with millions of dollars in philanthropic support. That undertaking, organized through the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, will devote $16.7 million over a five-year period to teacher training. It is supported by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation.

If high school students are to master the skills and knowledge they need to do well in college or good jobs, their teachers need to be up to the task. And that will require revamping teacher-training programs, according to a paper released last week. In a brief called “Teaching for a New World,”Requires Adobe Acrobat Reader the Alliance for Excellent Education calls on colleges of education to step up their training in adolescent literacy to ensure that all teacher-candidates are well versed not only in the subjects they intend to teach, but also in the reading-comprehension and writing strategies necessary for those subjects. The alliance, a Washington-based group that focuses on improving high schools, also urges teacher-training programs to do better at producing teachers who have both deep knowledge of the content they teach and mastery of the best pedagogical approaches to teaching that material. That instructional challenge is colored by the age group of the students.

On Thursday, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan went to Columbia University's Teachers College, the oldest teacher-training school in the nation, and delivered a speech blasting the education schools that have trained the majority of the 3.2 million teachers working in U.S. public schools today. "By almost any standard, many if not most of the nation's 1,450 schools, colleges and departments of education are doing a mediocre job of preparing teachers for the realities of the 21st century classroom," he said to an audience of teaching students who listened with more curiosity than ire — this was Columbia University after all, and they knew Duncan wasn't talking to them.