Linking Teacher Education Preparation to Assessment of Student Achievement

English Version

Assessing teacher education preparation programs and teacher effectiveness have been the foci of numerous documents and studies in recent years (e.g., Bembry, Jordan, Gomez, Anderson, & Mendro, 1998; Campbell, Kyriakides, Muijs, & Robinson, 2004; Cochran-Smith & Zeichner, 2005; Darling-Hammond & Young, 2002; Wineburg, 2006). Current interest in accountability includes the measurement of K-12 students’ academic achievement, focused in recent years on standardized tests. This issue affects students and educators at all levels. School districts’ levels of funding and accreditation are related to students’ test score achievement as well as other measures (Carlson & Levin, 2005; Greenwald, Hedges, & Laine, 1996), and “all schools, colleges and departments of education ... face increasing pressure to attend to evidence for program legitimacy” (McNergney, 2006, p. 1). With regard to teacher education preparation, the call has been made to measure its quality in terms of the academic success of the pre-K to twelfth grade students taught by those programs’ graduates (Cochran & Zeichner, 2005; Good et al., 2006; McNergney, 2006; Opdenakkera & Van Damme, 2006).

The purpose of this paper is to discuss some of the problematic issues surrounding the assessment of teacher education programs in light of structural and practical variables, particularly in terms of teacher effectiveness and availability of useable data linking K-12 grade student test scores to their classroom teachers’ preparation programs. Although the issues regarding teacher education have been discussed in the education literature, there are many pre-conceived beliefs about what objectives teacher education should identify and accomplish. For example, a commonly described goal is that an effective teacher education program should demonstrate a positive impact on K-12 student achievement. The issues in this paper may help to inform state education policymakers and practitioners in making sensible and realistic decisions about teacher education programs’ value relevant to the K-12 educational system and, fundamentally, to K-12 student achievement. We argue that there exists a need to further clarify these issues in light of verifiable data, more careful study, and definition.

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