Kevin Bastian - Evaluating Teacher Preparation Programs with Teacher Evaluation Ratings

Teacher preparation programs have long been judged on criteria such as licensing exam scores and teacher retention rates. Now, states are moving toward multi-outcome measures, including teacher evaluation ratings, to assess program quality.
UNC researcher and associate director of the Education Policy Initiative at Carolina (EPIC) Kevin Bastian recently led a statewide study of the relationships between teacher preparation programs and their graduates’ evaluation ratings after entering the workforce.
He joins University of Wisconsin-Madison research Peter Goff to discuss his findings and their potential implications for researchers, policymakers, and practitioners.
—
Jump to Questions:
2:09 - Your article with co-authors Christina Patterson and Ye Pan is titled, Evaluating Teacher Preparation Programs with Teacher Evaluation Ratings: Implications for Program Accountability and Improvement, and it speaks to an issue that has received quite a bit of attention lately. Namely, that, how can we evaluate teacher preparation programs? The idea of evaluating educated preparation programs has been underway for about the last 30 years, but it's encountered little empirical success. Can you give us a bit of back ground on the evaluation of teacher preparation programs, and what's lead to this renewed interest in the area?
3:33 - Some of this recent work has been done with value added, as you mentioned. What's been the synopsis of that work?
5:20 - Now, other studies have used teacher matriculation, right, moving from the teacher preparation program into the workforce, teacher retention in the workforce, in the first year and beyond ... and, as you mentioned more recently, measures the teacher' contribution to student learning, value added. Your study uses a different outcome measure. Can you tell us what you used, and how this improves on prior measures?
7:01 - So, now that you've solved the outcome quandary, what are some of the other challenges that you anticipated, when analyzing your data, and what steps did you take to mitigate those threats?
8:31 - … You're also able to identify, make the claim that evaluation ratings are a function of preparation quality, not just the selection into programs.
Which is a response to the potential criticism that we create a ranking system, where all we're really doing is identifying the universities that are capable of selecting the best students. Then they go out, and the universities haven't really done anything. The people, the students that were stronger there are now stronger teachers, and we haven't really learned anything. How were you able to separate those two?
10:30 - What are some of the findings you found in your research?
14:02 - Federal Funds being attached to evaluation ratings - How would think about using this as a component of, how would it contribute to, in, overall evaluation of teacher education programs, in a high stakes context?
---
The CPRE Knowledge Hub is headquartered at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education. For more videos, podcasts, research analysis, and interactive discussion in the realm of education, visit or follow @cprehub on Twitter.

Kevin Bastian - Evaluating Teacher Preparation Programs with Teacher Evaluation Ratings