Huge shot and an assist for Arne
In a major and much-welcomed move, Florida has begun using the FCAT to evaluate colleges of education with some fascinating results:
It determined what percentage of graduates from each program had 50 percent or more of their students make a year’s worth of progress. USF’s College of Education — a huge pipeline for teachers in the Tampa Bay area — had 76 percent of its graduates reach that bar, putting it ninth among the 10 state university programs. Florida International University in Miami topped the field at 85 percent. The University of West Florida in Pensacola was last at 70 percent…
The department also used FCAT scores to determine which rookies from each program were “high performing.” USF had 15 percent of its graduates in that category, putting it at No. 6 among state university programs…FIU again led the pack, with 23 percent. Florida A&M University was last with 7 percent.
Florida has probably been planning this type of analysis for a while, but Secretary Duncan’s pushing for such evaluations surely helped. Score one for the Sunshine State with a big assist from Arne.
Related posts:
- Half of college diplomas are useless?
- Is Arne Duncan’s new civil rights crusade unconstitutional?
- The children left behind
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
November 21st, 2009 at 1:35 pm
If there’s no predictive validity data on the FCAT–that doing better on it translates into real-world success, and that incremental gains on it for various subgroups translate into incremental gains in life–why is this data meaningful.
I laughed out loud at the one about judging schools of education based on those test scores. Seriously now, does that mean that teachers from those schools are teaching to the test more, are cheating more, are neglecting more those important outcomes not on tests, or are more likely to teach in areas with richer kids who were making faster progress anyway?
How could we possibly know what sense to make of that data?
November 23rd, 2009 at 1:17 pm
I can see one potentially good use of this data: figure out how these results compare against (1) the selectivity of each program and (2) break down data by placement type. If you can find two equally selective programs, and compare how their grads do, controlling for school type (Title 1 etc.), and that School A does better, that’s pretty solid evidence that School A should get more state money and open more slots.