Louisiana serves as model in teacher assessment - washingtonpost.com: ...How much they advance will affect not only the students and their school, but also the university a few miles away that trained Bower. Through an initiative that Education Secretary Arne Duncan calls a model for the nation, Louisiana has become the first state to tie student test scores into a chain of evaluation that reaches all the way to teacher colleges. Those that fail to perform on this new metric someday could face shake-ups or, in extreme cases, closure.
"It's accountability on steroids," said E. Joseph Savoie, president of the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, which trained Bower.
The movement to overhaul public education through high-stakes testing has accelerated since the 2002 No Child Left Behind law mandated an expansion of standardized exams and put low-performing schools in jeopardy. Now, the Obama administration wants to use test scores to help evaluate teachers and the institutions that train them. Louisiana provides the most aggressive example.
