In Search of Tools that Inform Practice: Utilizing Program Accountability Data to Guide Program Improvement

In light of the fact that policy makers are attempting to build accountability systems that will hold teachers, and the teacher education programs that prepared them, accountable for student achievement results, failure on the part of teacher educators to repeatedly and assertively advocate for a significant role in shaping the accountability systems for teacher education programs and to structure them in ways that can lead to program improvement will undoubtedly be a missed opportunity with dire consequences that will take years, if not decades, to correct. The data analysis practices advocated in this article yield data that teacher preparation programs could use for program improvement. The authors use actual student achievement data collected through an earlier large-scale teacher induction study to demonstrate the ways in which the proposed data analysis approach could be useful to teacher educators interested in program improvement. (Contains 3 figures.)