Student progress can be tied to teacher's school

Donna Gordon Blankinship:

The academic progress of public school students can be traced, in part, to where their teachers went to college, according to new research by the University of Washington Center for Education Data & Research.

But the center's director, Dan Goldhaber, cautioned that the study is just a first step toward determining what kind of training -- not where the training occurred -- best prepares teachers for excellence in the classroom.

Even so, it's the kind of information U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan would like every school to have access to and that's why he recently announced a new program to use federal dollars to pay for similar research.

Washington state schools are among the first to see which teacher training programs seem to result in the best student test scores, but 35 states now have the means to do similar research, according to the Data Quality Campaign, a national organization formed by education and business groups to track state progress on collecting data about students and schools.

Posted by Jim Zellmer at October 16, 2011 1:21 AM
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