The University’s teacher preparation programs are effective at producing consistently over-performing educators, according to the Louisiana Board of Regents’ 2011-2012 Annual Report for Teacher Preparation.
In April, the University’s education programs were fully accredited by the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education. The accreditation came back without any stipulations of recommendations for improvement, according to Laura Lindsay, dean of the LSU College of Human Sciences & Education.
“The accreditation process is very rigorous and closely scrutinizes every education program at the school over a seven-year period,” Lindsay said. “For that to come back without any qualifiers is huge.”
Lindsay said another way to gauge the school’s effectiveness is the value-added system.
The system is set up as a statistical analysis of a teacher’s impact on their students’ learning and achievement, according to associate education professor Eugene Kennedy, who analyzes the numbers for the University.
Kennedy said teachers are placed into one of four categories based on their value-added scores and predicted student growth: ineffective, emerging, proficient and highly effective. He also said the Board of Regents’ report found most recent University graduates are outperforming what they expect to see from new teachers.
“The Board of Regents accepts and expects most new teachers to fall in that emerging category because they are still learning the ropes,” Kennedy said. “But in fact what they are seeing is most of our new teachers exceeding those expectations in all programs.”
Lindsay said two changes made in 2005 are the major reasons for the improvement: a state redesign of the teacher-education programs and the implementation of stricter admissions standards by the University.
The redesign in 2005 allowed multiple School of Education programs to begin offering year-long student teaching, instead of only semester-long. School of Education professor Renee Casbergue said this made a significant difference in helping student teachers become effective teachers immediately after they graduate and enter the workforce.
In 2005, the University also increased its admission standard from a 2.3 GPA to a 3.0. Lindsay said the School of Education has seen a consistently better group of students entering its program since the switch. The mean GPA of students in the undergraduate programs is 3.3 and the mean GPA of students in the Holmes Graduate Program is 3.875, she said.
The 2013 edition of Education Week’s Quality Counts, a report that tracks and grades each state’s educational policy efforts and outcomes, rated Louisiana as the No. 15 state in the country. Louisiana received a score of 79.0, 2.1 points better than the national average.
Lindsay and Kennedy both said some data indicates that the improvement of state-educated teachers played a role in the state’s success, but it was too early to draw any real conclusions.
