If you haven’t seen it yet, check out my colleague Stephen Sawchuk’s blog item on what may be the first study to attempt to gauge the effectiveness of teachers certified by the American Board for Certification of Teacher Excellence.
The ABCTE program is a national alternative route that allows would-be teachers to bypass traditional education school coursework.
In this Florida study by researchers from Mathematica Policy Research Inc., secondary-school students of the alternatively certified teachers performed about the same in reading, and worse in math, than those whose teachers were traditionally certified.
As Sawchuk dutifully point out, there’s a big caveat here. The study was based on a very small, nonrandom sample of ABCTE teachers from a single state—about 30 teachers in all—state so it’s too soon to draw any solid conclusions from the findings.