Which colleges produce the best teachers?
There's no easy answer, of course, and it depends on how you define "best," but the New Teacher Project, on behalf of the Houston Independent School District, has crunched an interesting sliver of data. The researchers looked at which of the most popular local colleges produced teaching graduates who ranked at the very top and very bottom of the pack based on their students' test scores. Specifically, the teachers were judged on their value-added scores (the same ones HISD uses to determine who gets performance bonuses). The scores, as you'll remember, are based on a complex statistical analysis that projects how well each student is expected to perform on the TAKS and ranks teachers according to whose students perform better (or worse) than expected. Only teachers of core subjects in grades three through eight have individual value-added marks; high school teachers are rated as a group by subject, and those in other grades and subjects don't have TAKS scores.
With all that out of the way, here are some highlights of the data:
*The University of Texas at Austin had the highest percentage of teachers ranked in the top 10 percent in at least one subject. But it also had the highest percentage of teachers who ranked in the bottom decile. Specifically, of the 440 UT grads who had multiple years of value-added scores, 18 percent ranked in the top decile, 19 percent fell in the bottom and 63 percent ranked in the middle.
*Sam Houston State and Texas Southern University had larger percentages of their graduates rank in the bottom 10 percent than in the top. Of TSU's 1,615 graduates with available data, 13 percent ranked in the top and 17 percent ranked in the bottom. Of Sam Houston's 363 graduates with available data, 12 percent ranked in the top and 18 percent were at the bottom.
*Graduates of Texas A&M University were twice as likely to rank in the top than in the bottom. Of the 283 graduates with available scores, 16 percent were in the top and 8 percent were in the bottom.
*The University of Houston's main campus is the biggest producer of HISD teachers with value-added data. Of the 2,435 graduates with multiple years of scores, 15 percent ranked in the top and 11 percent fell in the bottom.
Daniel Weisberg, vice president of policy for the New Teacher Project, describes this data
So new research shows that teens may be biologically inclined to make bad decisions and partake in risky behavior.
Mom, my brain made me do it!
So new research shows that teens may be biologically inclined to make bad decisions and partake in risky behavior.
University of Texas at Austin psychologist Russell Poldrack and fellow researchers have taken a major step in identifying which brain systems cause teens to have these urges and the implications they may hold for rash adolescent behavior.
"Our results raise the hypothesis that these risky behaviors, such as experimenting with drugs or having unsafe sex, are actually driven by over activity in the mesolimbic dopamine system, a system which appears to be the final pathway to all addictions, in the adolescent brain," Poldrack said in a press release.