Track the Teacher
Indiana Superintendent of Public Instruction Dr. Tony Bennett is about to launch a program that will definitely raise the ire and the eyebrows of the education establishment in Indiana.
Bennett’s office is preparing to launch a tracking system tying graduates of Indiana’s Colleges of Education to the academic performance of their students. The program is based on a Louisiana model where students’ test performance is tracked back to the teachers and then the teachers’ preparation programs.
According the New Orleans Times Picayune…
[Education Secretary Arne] Duncan called the Louisiana strategy “a simple but obvious idea.”
“Colleges of education and district officials ought to know which teacher preparation programs are effective and which need fixing. Transparency, longitudinal data, and competition can be powerful tonics for programs stuck in the past.”
He said that as a result of the study’s findings, officials at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette added a career counseling program to help teachers adapt to the classroom and strengthened course requirements in English.
“Real change, based upon the real outcomes of children — revolutionary, isn’t it?”
Bennett says bringing the same system to Indiana will bring more accountability to education and show which colleges of education in the state are producing quality teachers and which ones aren’t. Bennett says he will also use the data to rank Indiana’s colleges of education from best to worst based on student achievement.
Life in the classroom is going to get interesting.
