Where Tennessee's Best and Worst New Teachers Were Trained and Where They Teach

These charts display data that are reported in Tennessee's 2011 Report Card on the Effectiveness of Teacher Training Programs.  They show the number of high, average, and low performing teachers who are recent graduates (i.e., 3 years of experience or less) of Tennessee's training programs.  Only the programs that have produced 5 or more teachers over the past 3 years are included.

The school districts in which these new teachers have been employed may be determined by visiting the individual report for each program.  Just visit the Report Card site and click on the program name.

Teacher effectiveness is measured by the annual achievement gains of the students that they have been teaching in three subjects:  Reading/ Language Arts, Math, and Composite (all tested subjects). (You can also review charts from 2010 in reading and math.)

The green portion of each bar indicates the number of beginning teachers who are as effective as the top 20% of Tennessee's veteran teachers.  The red portion indicates the number of beginning teachers who perform at the level of the bottom 20% of Tennessee's veterans and the yellow represents the number of beginners whose performance is in the 21% to 79% range. 

Several conclusions may be drawn from this data:

• Most programs are producing at least some excellent (i.e., top-20%) teachers.
• With two notable exceptions--the Teach for America programs--virtually all programs are producing many times more average and poor than excellent teachers.
• Tennessee's schools are being infused with an alarmingly large number of new teachers whose performance during their initial 3 years is well below average.  This finding means that their students' TCAP scores are dropping an average of 8 percentile ranks relative to the average student.  For obvious reasons, parents and schools should be concerned that these new teachers are more carefully vetted before hiring and supervised during their initial years of service. 
• For Tennessee's overall student achievement outcomes to increase within the foreseeable future, teacher hiring processes will have to become far more selective.  As matters stand, it is evident that Tennessee's teacher training, testing, and licensure processes are failing to protect students from veritable deluge of mediocre to poorly equipped teachers.