State education leaders are trying to measure how well Georgia colleges train future teachers. They plan to add a new method of evaluation to measure how graduates perform once they start working in the classroom.

Starting this year, education majors will be tracked for five years after they graduate to see how well they perform on the job. Those evaluations will go toward measuring how well colleges are training teachers for the classroom.

“We’re going to be looking at outcomes,” says Cindi Chance, the executive director of the Georgia Association of Colleges for Teacher Education.

We’re going to be looking at whether or not our graduates can in fact teach school. And to me, that’s the bottom line.”

Mike Mahan, the Dean of the School of Education at Gordon State College in Barnesville, says they want students who feel teaching is their calling.

“There has to be that passion within you that this is what you want to do. You had that one or two outstanding teachers in your career and you want to be like that.”

Colleges will use their graduates’ evaluations to prepare their current and future students for the workplace.

Chance says this is the first time Georgia colleges will be measured by how well their graduates perform, rather than by how many graduates they turn out.

“So if my folks out in the school are getting bad evaluations from their principals that they don’t assimilate well into the profession, [such as] they don’t stay in the profession, they drop out, or their children don’t score well, that will become criteria for the evaluation of our teacher education programs.”

Contributors: Shauna Stuart

Tags: education, teachers, Shauna Stuart