That’s one of the takeaways from a new report being released today by the National Council on Teacher Quality, or NCTQ.
According to the report titled Connect the Dots: Using Evaluations of Teacher Effectiveness to Inform Policy and Practice, only eight states have adopted policies that link the performance of students to their teachers and the institutions where their teachers were prepared for the profession.
Those states are: Colorado, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, North Carolina, Ohio and Tennessee.
Timothy F.C. Knowles, director of the Urban Education Institute at the University of Chicago, said the number of such states should be higher.
“One clear message in the NCTQ report is that far too few states plan to use teacher evaluation data to shed light on the quality of the teacher preparation pipeline,” Knowles said. “This is a huge missed opportunity to hold teacher preparation institutions accountable for the quality of people they deliver to the American school house.”
Although Knowles ― like many others in his field ― was a critic of NCTQ’s “Teacher Prep Review,” which judged teacher prep programs based on their structure, as opposed to actual outcomes, he called NCTQ’s recommendation to use teacher evaluations as just one way to assess the quality of teacher preparation programs “more sensible.”
