Carnegie Project on Teacher Impact

The UW Teachers for a New Era (TNE) project is funded by Carnegie Foundation along with another 10 sites across the United States. Among a set of goals and principles set forth by the Carnegie Foundation is a mandate that sites drive changes and content of their teacher education program by evidence based decisions and that a key part of this evidence be growth in pupil learning (i.e. just not simply teacher satisfaction or teacher readiness). In my talk I set forth a research design and program structure that will provide a means to examine empirically this link between teacher (and teacher training content) to growth in pupil learning. I present a growth curve and value added approach to the problem and demonstrate how I hope to link teacher preparation and teacher characteristics to growth in pupil performance on mathematics and English language proficiency. I review some general approaches in the literature, discuss the current design, and lay out some general problems expected to be encountered (both in implementation and analysis), and possible solutions to these. I also discuss additional TNE projects planned and underway which are designed to provide evidence on the general teacher program at Washington.