Rationale: Graduate outcomes / Graduates' effectiveness
Mirroring a similar commitment now found in K-12 education, higher education institutions must embrace datadriven decision making and accountability by tracking the performance of their graduates. In states such as Louisiana, Tennessee and Florida, state education agencies are developing this capacity through their longitudinal data systems and have begun to provide teacher preparation programs with the results. The most sophisticated use of such data is to measure the performance of the students taught by an institution's graduates relative to the performance of students taught by the graduates of other institutions in the state.
In Illinois, the state-level capacity to conduct this sort of analysis is still limited. Illinois does not have a state data system that can be used to provide evidence of teacher effectiveness. While it has assigned unique teacher identifiers and unique student identifiers that connect student data across key databases across years, and it has the capacity to match student test records from year to year to measure student academic growth, it cannot match individual teacher records with individual student records.
Nevertheless, teacher preparation programs can and should attempt to undertake less complex tracking systems and collect information on the performance of their graduates from hiring school districts using such resources as the Illinois Teacher Data Warehouse and the Consortium on Chicago School Research. Follow-up surveys of program graduates that provide self-assessments of the effectiveness of preparation are important but insufficient; school district personnel who hire program graduates are critical sources of feedback.
