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Ohio Looks for the Key to Perfect Teachers

Ohanian Comment: It would be easier and cheaper just to put a pea under a stack of mattresses, tell the teacher to try to sleep on top. The perfect teacher, of course, will be bothered by the lump of the pea. Simple.


Ohio will try to answer a question that has been stumping educators for decades: What makes a good teacher?

The Ohio Partnership for Accountability - a group that includes all 51 college schools of education, the Ohio Department of Education and the Ohio Board of Regents - is studying how the preparation of new teachers affects the performance of their students.

The five-year analysis is the first of its kind in the nation and is already being viewed as a model for teacher education reform.

The $10 million project will track the performance of recent graduates of the state's education schools by looking at the English and math scores of the children they teach.

It will also look at the techniques of 25,000 new and veteran teachers and compare them to what education majors are learning in college.

The goal: Replicate successful teacher-education programs and fix the failing ones.

"What a group of us deans said was, 'We're willing to take the challenge,' " said Thomas Lasley, dean of the University of Dayton's School of Education and Allied Professions and co-chairman of the partnership. "We've got tons of graduates, but no mechanism to assess the relative effectiveness of those teachers."

The mechanism the project will use is a groundbreaking formula developed by former University of Tennessee Professor William Sanders. Sanders devised a system of assessing schools and teachers based on the test-score gains of their students.

The system was adopted by Tennessee in 1992 and is used by every school district in that state. But this is the first time Sanders' system, which measures the value a teacher adds to a student's experience in the classroom, is being used to assess the quality of a state's teacher education programs.

Sanders' research is important because it argues that an effective teacher can produce improvement in any student, whether poor or affluent.

Ohio colleges awarded nearly 8,000 teaching degrees in 2001-2002, according to the Ohio Board of Regents.

"We subscribe to the belief that teacher quality is the single most important in-school variable affecting student achievement," said Jeffrey Glebocki, senior policy analyst for the George Gund Foundation. "To that end, we look to [the project] as a unique opportunity to shed light on what efforts contribute to building better teacher quality in Ohio."

Last month, Gund Foundation trustees approved a first-year grant of $50,000 for the project and will consider future funding, Glebocki said. Other organizations, including Proctor & Gamble of Cincinnati, also have chipped in money.

Sanders has his critics. Some, such as George Mason University Professor Gerald Bracey, think it unwise to put a numerical value on teacher quality. Vanderbilt University Professor Susan Goldman has expressed concern that teachers with very high-performing students will be penalized because they will be unable to show much improvement.

But Ohio's two largest teacher unions, the Ohio Federation of Teachers and the Ohio Education Association, are cooperating on the Ohio project.

Other states also are looking to researchers such as Sanders for answers about what constitutes good instruction. Under the federal No Child Left Behind law, all states are required to have a "highly qualified" teacher in every classroom.

"If you look at law schools, they look at the passage rate on bar exams," said Lasley, the co- chair of the Ohio Partnership for Accountability. "But how effective are they as lawyers? We've got the same problem in teacher education."


sstephens@plaind.com,


— Scott Stephens
Plain Dealer
2004-01-11
http://www.cleveland.com/education/index.ssf?/base/isedu/1073820756136170.xml

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