MICHELE NORRIS, host:
We hear it all the time: Good teachers make a difference. But how do you train teachers to be good? Leaders at teacher education programs still aren't sure. So the state of Louisiana has decided to figure it out.
As NPR's Larry Abramson reports, the effort is attracting national attention and causing some local discomfort.
LARRY ABRAMSON: Statistician George Noell wanted to do something no one had ever done before. He wanted to compare the success rates of teachers from different training programs in his home state of Louisiana. He didn't want to rely on the old measures of success, like whether principals were happy with their teachers. He wanted an objective measure of gains by students taught by, say, me.
Dr. GEORGE NOELL (Professor of Psychology, Louisiana State University; Statistician): In essence, who taught Larry math? Then we look at, for the youngsters that Larry taught, how did they score on the state's achievement tests at the end of the spring the year before Larry worked with them and then that following spring?
ABRAMSON: Good test scores should show that my teacher training program was doing something right. Bad scores would indicate my program didn't do a good job.
Noell says there are so many variables in education, he wasn't sure he'd see any meaningful differences between programs.
Dr. NOELL: Right off the bat, we saw in just a small sample within a few districts - geographically close together districts - between two institutions that prepared a lot of their mathematics teachers, some what looked like pretty notable differences between the performance of the graduates from the two institutions.
ABRAMSON: In fact, grads from some state schools were getting classroom results that rivaled those of experienced teachers - pretty surprising when you think about it. The results were supposed to help training programs do a better job. But when the news came out, schools were ranked like baseball teams. And that led to some headlines that were a little embarrassing to Gerald Carlson, dean of the education school at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.
Dr. GERALD CARLSON (Dean of Education, University of Louisiana, Lafayette): I think it said UL-Lafayette College of Education, you know, last in the state.
ABRAMSON: Carlson says that wasn't quite right. But one program at the university did do poorly in English language arts. So the university has changed the curriculum to boost the English skills of graduates. And, Carlson says, he's trying to make the program more selective.
Dr. CARLSON: We've tightened the backdoor. We're screening them more carefully. We're looking at their ACT scores. And so, now we're going to make them go back and remediate if they don't have the background that we feel is necessary.
ABRAMSON: That's good, right? School gets info from study, changes program, improves teacher performance. Trouble is, the study didn't exactly tell schools what they need to do to improve. And that leaves many people down here in the dark about what they should do.
Ms. NANCY ROBERTS (CEO, Louisiana Resource Center for Educators): I'm Nancy Roberts. And I'm the executive director of the Louisiana Resource Center for Educators.
ABRAMSON: Nancy Roberts founded the resource center over a decade ago to address a big problem in the state: Thousands of teachers were working without proper training. She put together a lending library in this open, light-filled warehouse in Baton Rouge, full of books that teachers can check out, even skeletons and models of the human body. The place feels warm and inviting.
Ms. ROBERTS: I really always wanted to have a nice place for teachers to go to train instead of putting them in a back room someplace.
ABRAMSON: But Roberts learned that some of her graduates aren't doing as well as she had hoped. Their students scored lower on the Louisiana study. Roberts felt bad about that and said she'd like to give her graduates some additional support. But she can't.
Ms. ROBERTS: We know who we trained, but we don't know who's in the study. It's not enough to help us pinpoint where we need to improve.
ABRAMSON: The study only told schools how their graduates did in general. It didn't say which graduates fell short. Some educators say the study falls short on other levels. It judges teachers strictly on the basis of annual test, the same ones used to judge student performance under No Child Left Behind.
Jim Meza, dean of the School of Education at the University of New Orleans, says that means it ignores the one thing that really stymies new teachers: classroom management.
Dr. JAMES MEZA (Dean, College of Education, University of New Orleans): That typically becomes the number one need of new teachers. This data currently doesn't tell us that at all. You also need some level of observation to complement academic growth.
ABRAMSON: Teacher effectiveness is a hot issue nationwide, but it is white hot here in New Orleans, where loads of newcomers have arrived to help rebuild the education system here. The impact of those new teachers is the focus of tomorrow's story.
Larry Abramson, NPR News.