General Teacher Preparation Policy
Student Growth Data: Louisiana requires educator preparation programs to collect and report data on the performance and effectiveness of program graduates, as measured by student growth data. The state reports value-added scores in mathematics, science, social studies, and English language arts and the final evaluation ratings for first-and second-year teachers who have completed each teacher preparation program.
Additional Program Data: Louisiana collects other objective, meaningful data to measure the performance of teacher preparation programs. The state publicly reports program data on five-year teacher retention rates and the passage rates for state teacher licensure assessments. Louisiana plans to report data based on student survey results. Under its Teacher Preparation Quality Rating System, Louisiana will collect, report, and eventually use in an accountability system, the percentage of program completers in high-need certification areas, the percentage of residents placed in high-need schools, and the value-added results of program completers.
As a result of Louisiana's strong data collection policy for its teacher preparation programs, no recommendations are provided.
Louisiana recognized the factual accuracy of this analysis. Louisiana was a helpful in providing NCTQ with facts that enhanced the analysis as well as the analysis for Goal 1-D: Program Reporting Requirements.
For additional information on Louisiana's Teacher Preparation Quality Rating System, please refer to Goal 1-D: Program Reporting Requirements.
1C: Program Performance Measures
The state should examine a number of factors when measuring the performance of and approving teacher preparation programs.[1] Although the quality of both the subject-matter preparation and professional sequence is crucial, there are also additional measures that can provide the state and the public with meaningful, readily understandable indicators of how well programs are doing when it comes to preparing teachers to be successful in the classroom.[2]
States have made great strides in building data systems with the capacity to provide evidence of teacher performance.[3] These same data systems can be used to link teacher effectiveness to the teacher preparation programs from which they came. States should make such data, as well as other objective measures that go beyond licensure test pass rates, central components of their teacher preparation program approval processes, and they should establish precise standards for performance that are more useful for accountability purposes.[4]
National accrediting bodies, such as CAEP, are raising the bar, but are no substitute for states' own policy. A number of states now have somewhat more rigorous academic standards for admission by virtue of requiring that programs meet CAEP's accreditation standards. However, whether CAEP will uniformly uphold its standards (especially as they have already backtracked on the GPA requirement) and deny accreditation to programs that fall short of these admission requirements remains to be seen.[5] Clear state policy would eliminate this uncertainty and send an unequivocal message to programs about the state's expectations.[6]