A variety of methods for evaluating teacher education programs will be weighed for their methodological rigor, accuracy, and utility as part of a new research project recently launched by the National Academy of Education and George Washington University.

The new project is at least partly a reaction to a controversial review of every teacher education school in the country that is now being conducted by the Washington-based National Council on Teacher Quality and U.S. News & World Report.

Project investigators will likely examine such measures as:

• Teacher-college accreditation;
• Value-added approaches that determine how program graduates are faring at raising students’ academic achievement;
• Teacher-performance assessments; and
• Syllabus studies, which form the basis of the NCTQ review.

Several of those methods are fairly new. Their validity, reliability, and how they might shape teacher education are the subject of much debate, even as they garner interest in the policy community.