The U.S. Department of Education released a study on how alternatively certified teachers affect student achievement. The bottom line is that they find: “students of teachers who chose to enter teaching through an alternative route did not perform statistically different from students of teachers who chose a traditional route to teaching. This finding was the same for those programs that required comparatively many as well as few hours of coursework. However, among those alternative route teachers who reported taking coursework while teaching, their students performed lower than their traditional counterparts.”
I’m sure that the headlines will be: “Alternative Certification Fails to Improve Student Achievement.” But they will have it backwards. The real headline should be: “Years of Teacher Education Coursework Yields No Benefits for Student Achievement.”
Besides, the real question is whether the alternatively certified teachers are better than the traditional certified teachers districts would have hired if they were constrained to hire only certified teachers.
And in other research news, the forthcoming issue of Education Next has an article by Paul Peterson and Matthew Chingos comparing student achievement in Philadelphia’s for-profit managed schools versus district-managed schools. The find: “the effect of for-profit management of schools is positive relative to district schools, with math impacts being statistically significant. Over the last six years, students learned each year an average of 25 percent of a standard deviation more in math — roughly 60 percent of a year’s worth of learning — than they would have had the school been under district management. In reading, the estimated average annual impact of for-profit management is a positive 10 percent of a standard deviation — approximately 36 percent of a year’s worth of reading. Only the math differences are statistically significant, however.”
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