Grading The Teacher's Teacher In Ohio

Education programs in Ohio's university system will be undergoing some new measures to gauge how well they are training their teachers of tomorrow

. This will make Ohio the "first state in the nation to grade colleges on how well they train teachers to help students succeed." There are 15 measures to be implemented, announced Chancellor Eric D. Fingerhut, which will test teachers in both public and private universities. Ohio was one of only 12 states to receive federal funding from President Obama's "Race to the Top" plan, which boasted a $4.3 billion budget. About $400 million was given to Ohio, which was then split accordingly amongst all schools.

These testing measures are strikingly similar to "the state report cards of Ohio's K-12 schools", since they examine how much a student has learned in one year compared to the previous year. The determining factor is "teaching quality," said Fingerhut. He continued by saying, "And so we have a moral, professional and institutional obligation to make sure the quality of teachers is as high as possible."

The state teacher licensure exam will now have a "value-added" component, which will be reflected by the schools submitting annual data detailing how well students perform. The State Board of Education is developing this component as a function of Ohio's "Race to the Top" plan. This data will allow administrators to track the academic growth of students individually through the years, no matter what school they attend. Another new evaluation method will "create a teacher-performance assessment that measures how well new teachers communicate with parents, structure lesson plans and manage classrooms."

Money that was received from Obama's education reform will be divided amongst various sectors: mentoring programs to close the gap between minority and white groups, teacher planning, and the redesign of teacher evaluations. New coalitions betweeneducation colleges and "academically struggling schools" will evolve, giving both institutions added advantages, such as extra recognition and more individual student attention and interaction.

While the first report won't be available until the end of 2012, schools are already planning their courses for the next few years. Rob Evans, press secretary for the Ohio Board of Regents further emphasizes this fact, "We're essentially starting from scratch, and a lot of this information isn't even available yet." Once benchmarks are created and distributed for each category, results can be compared and then compiled. The oft-heard complaint from many teachers is that they were not prepared well enough in college for what awaited them in the real classroom. With this, and the new evaluations, in place, it seems as if the road to reconciliation for these two disparate worlds might be just around the corner.

by: Emily Sismour

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