'Value Added' Concept Proves Beneficial to Teacher Colleges

The use of “value added” information appears poised to expand into the nation’s teacher colleges, with more than a dozen states planning to use the technique to analyze how graduates of training programs fare in classrooms.

Supporters say the data could help determine which teacher education pathways produce teachers who are at least as good as—or even better than—other novice teachers, spurring other providers to emulate their practices.

The two states with the most experience using such data, Louisiana and Tennessee, have shown that it can be a powerful catalyst for change. Both can point to programs that have seen improvements in value-added scores after altering aspects of their programming. Nevertheless, teacher-educators and state officials alike continue to wrestle with how best to translate what are, in essence, fairly blunt measures of program effectiveness into a regular cycle for...