Teachers certified through Lipscomb are fairing well in their positions according to the latest state report card. Ranked third below Teach for America Memphis and Teach for America Nashville, Lipscomb graduates outshone more traditional colleges throughout the state.
For the last four years, the state has done a report card on teacher preparation programs across the state. The state looks at those teachers’ impact on their particular students. The report looks at students’ scores on standardized tests – TCAP here in Tennessee – to see how much, if any, the students improved because of a graduate’s teaching ability. Once that is done, the results are then linked to the university that the teacher came from.
“The connection is between the teacher prep program and how many of your graduates have some kind of statistically positive impact on students,” said Dr. Candice McQueen, dean of the education department at Lipscomb.
Now a law within the state, the schools must report their “completers” to the Tennessee Higher Education Commission. That means that everyone who graduates with a teaching degree must be reported to the commission so the reports can be filed.
Lipscomb is fortunate enough to report several graduates as well. McQueen says the school’s placement rates are usually 95 percent or above. However, because of last year’s budget cuts, that rate was closer to 80 percent, which was still fairly high for the area.
“We have school districts that really love our graduates,” McQueen said. “They will call us and recruit them, in a sense.”
For this particular report, though, the state only looks at students that are in public schools between the third and the twelfth grade. Also excluded are health and P.E. teachers, Spanish teachers and music and theater teachers.
McQueen says that Lipscomb graduates preformed extraordinarily well in math and Algebra I, however, the reports that came back for social studies were very mediocre.
The University’s full report card van be viewed by visiting this link: http://www.tn.gov/thec/Divisions/fttt/account_report/2011reportcard/report_card.shtml and clicking on Lipscomb’s hyperlink.
Last year, TFA Memphis and Nashville were at the top along with Vanderbilt. Lipscomb was right at the top of the group that was just below those three.
“We were at the top of what I would consider the next group of 15 or so universities,” McQueen said. “All four years that they have done this, we have been at the top, but this was the first year that the statistical analysis showed that we were in the very top group.”
The first year that the study came out, when money was short, the ranking system was very different than the one the state has now. However, now that money is coming in from the Race to the Top; today’s study is very sophisticated and very substantial, McQueen says.
“This year, I think that our math and science scores bumped us up over the rest of the universities,” McQueen said.
Lipscomb, as a whole, has been noted as visionary in the past, and the college of education, McQueen says, has been very reformed minded and has not stuck to the same ideas and things they’ve always done.
“We try to think of better ways to improve the teachers’ ability to reach out to their students and the communities that they are going into,” she says.
One thing that has changed is the number of clinical hours that a student must have before graduating. The number has been raised to help the students get a feel for what the teaching world is like. And McQueen says it is paying off.
“Our teachers get a lot of experience out in the field working with students,” she said. “Teaching is not something that one can learn by sitting in a classroom. Because it is a skill, you have to be doing it, and you have to be practicing it.”
At Lipscomb, students are already in the schools by their sophomore year, getting a feel for what a teacher does, looking at what works, getting mentors and getting contacts within school systems.
McQueen said that when those students get to the point where they begin their student teaching, they already have a lot of feedback and experience in the field.
The report only shows the teachers who are in their first three years out of college. After those three years, studies show that the teaching methods learned in college have worn off.