ESEA Improving Teacher Quality Grant Evaluation
For the Illinois Board of Higher Education
The Illinois Board of Higher Education has often had difficulty in assessing the impact of a statewide grant program by pooling evidence from individually funded grant projects. It has been even harder for the Board to extract from individual evaluations general lessons for policy and practice. The Center’s goal for the Evaluation Team is to derive general lessons for improving teacher quality by collating data from individual projects funded by the ESEA grants for Improving Teacher Quality. In brief, the goal is to solve the above-stated problem of generalizing from numerous individual grants to an assessment of the statewide program as a whole.
Generalizations from the individual programs to broader state policy implications are desirable and two types will assist the Illinois Board of Higher Education:
- guidelines to selecting the kinds of programs it would be effective to support in the future;
- conclusions about the substantive goals of the grant program.
The evaluation project examines what has been learned that other colleges and universities, school districts, and state agencies can use to improve teacher quality. A team of faculty and staff evaluators from the Center work together to carry out this project:
- Dr. Dianne Gardner
- Dr. Paul J. Baker
- Dr. W. Paul Vogt
- Dr. Lynne Haeffele
The evaluation team conducts annual symposiums with grantees and has developed several exploratory papers to assist current and potential grantees and the Illinois Board of Higher Education to strengthen grant project evaluation and improve outcomes related to teacher quality. These papers are available on the Illinois Board of Higher Education NCLB Symposium Materials web site.