Deconstructing Mathematica Study

Among the ranks of market fundamentalist education reformers, it is an article of faith that teacher preparation and teacher professional credentials predict nothing about the classroom effectiveness of teachers. A recent Mathematica study claimed that teachers who came to the profession through alternative routes that had little advance preparation did no worse than teachers who came out of traditional teacher preparation programs.

In a review of the Mathematica study, Sean P. Corcoran and Jennifer L. Jennings [until recently Eduwonkette] show that there is good evidence that alternatively certified teachers performed worse in math in grades 2-5, that alternatively certified teachers taking coursework performed worse in math, and that alternatively certified teachers received much lower principal evaluations and also much lower observational evaluations when their classrooms were observed by Mathematica researchers.

Tagged: certification, evaluations

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