Unprecedented natural disasters aside, Louisiana remains doggedly serious about sticking with its groundbreaking 2002 decision to hold its ed schools accountable for the quality of the teachers they train. A report updating progress on this initiative is out this month, and while the available data are not yet giving the state the ability to offer a thumbs up or down to particular ed schools, the state stands poised to do so in the near future.

Researchers at Louisiana State University have developed a value-added model that appears to work, with one interesting exception. The model is not yet producing reliable data on the performance of teachers who are teaching language arts. The researchers theorize that the problems in this subject area resulted from the fact that students are likely to have many more teachers and courses that fall into this general content area, making it more difficult to attribute effects to individual teachers. They assert that they can solve this in the future by separating reading and written language into two distinct content areas.

Why then do we still not know which ed schools in Louisiana are doing a good job? Results were reported for individual programs, but all sorts of problems got in the way, including the displacement of both teachers and students by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita and a change to the state test. But the most relevant issue is that the state underwent a wholesale redesign of its teacher preparation programs between 2000-2003. With the exception of some alternate route programs, new teachers that have completed supposedly redesigned programs have not yet hit classrooms. Thus, for most ed schools, the analysis measures the value added by effectively defunct programs.

None of these problems, however, will last. The bottom line is that the evidence is mounting that value added data can be used for accountability purposes to measure the effectiveness of teacher preparation programs, and that makes this a very important report.