At the end of last year, Louisiana released the first set of real findings from its multi-year effort to determine the value added by each of its teacher preparation programs. First in the country to break this ground, Louisiana is aiming to determine if one ed school better prepares teachers than another.

The first results from Louisiana look only at teachers coming out of six "alternate route" programs, which included a master's degree program at one school, a certification-only post-bac program at another and four "fast-track" programs that ran concurrently with a teacher's first year in the classroom. Importantly, one of the fast tracks was run by The New Teacher Project. As a state-approved teacher preparation program, TNTP enrolled both its own teachers, which it had recruited to work in the state, as well as many Teach For America corps members.

As you may recall, the results were great news for these two nationally important, popular sources of new teachers, with findings showing that their teachers were more effective than teachers coming through the three other fast tracks (yes, selectivity matters!) as well as the post-bac program. The TNTP teachers proved to be "comparable" to the the master's degree program graduates. Both TNTP and TFA were justifiably proud and the press was quick to add its own plaudits, including the New Orleans Times-Picayune, Education Week and the Flypaper blog.

Now having dug a little deeper into these findings (thanks to Howard Nelson at the AFT), we feel a bit hoodwinked. It turns out that the performance of TNTP teachers in their first year was never factored into these findings, because the study only looked at teachers' value added scores after they had officially completed their training. So the study compared first-year teachers from the master's and post-bac programs with second-year TNTP teachers. Since all teachers improve enormously in their first year on the job, the comparison is inapt. Can we cry foul?

Then do we really know anything? Yes. We know how each of the programs stacked up against other fully-licensed teachers, with second-year TNTP teachers clearly outperforming teachers with three or more years of experience in math, reading and language arts. So did the teachers from the master's program. If the question is which alt-cert program produced the most effective teachers, we know that TNTP produced more effective teachers than than the other fast-track programs (in one case by a hair), but we still don't know how the program stacks up against either the master's or the post-bac programs.

When we asked the lead researcher for the project why such an unfair advantage was given to TNTP (and the other three fast track programs), he said he was just following the specific instructions from the State Board of Regents to look at teachers only after they finished their training. The plan is now to produce a set of findings this summer that compares apples to apples.