IU School of Ed grads are ranked highly statewide

The results of Indiana teacher evaluations were released Monday, and IU graduates ranked high, according to an IU press release.

This is the first study of  its kind the Indiana Department of Education has done and the data they used was from a survey of teachers in their first three years of classroom teaching.

“These results clearly show that new teachers and university-based teacher preparation programs in the state are performing exceedingly well,” Dean of the School of Education, Gerardo Gonzalez, said in the release. “They also confirm our own internal studies about the preparation and effectiveness of Indiana University School of Education graduates.”

Out of the 281 graduates from IU Bloomington School of Education, 97 percent were rated as “effective” or “highly effective” as teachers.

Ninety-seven percent of 237 graduates of IU-Purdue University Indianapolis School of Education were rated “highly effective” or “effective,” according to the release.

“The statewide teacher evaluation data also showed a correlation between teacher effectiveness and experience,” Gonzalez said in the release. “The group of teachers with three years of experience had a larger proportion of highly effective teachers than the group of teachers with two years of experience, which had a larger proportion than the group with one year of experience.”

Gonzalez suggested the data be looked at carefully to see if recent teacher evaluation policies that discourage giving credit for experience in determination of the salary should be revised.

The evaluation provided more evidence the School of Education doesn’t need to lower its standards of preparation in order to attract effective teachers to the profession.
“Put simply, these data do not align with critics of teacher preparation who have been saying that the system is broken,” he said in the release. “We need to celebrate these results and stop creating a crisis that’s discouraging young, bright students like these teachers in Indiana from choosing teaching as a profession.”

Kathrine Schulze