The National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance within the Institute of Education Sciences has just released "An Evaluation of Teachers Trained Through Different Routes to Certification."
This study provides rigorous information on the impact of alternative routes to certification on student achievement for those types of programs that are most prevalent. It also provides suggestive evidence about what training and pre-training characteristics may be related to teacher performance. The evaluation is a randomized controlled trial (RCT) in which students in the same grade and school are randomly assigned to either a teacher who chose to be trained through a traditional education school route (TC teachers) or an alternative route (AC teachers) to certification. The evaluation compares the student achievement of elementary school students assigned to teachers who chose to be trained through different routes to certification - traditional education school routes that complete coursework prior to becoming the teacher of record and alternative routes. The evaluation found that students of teachers who chose to enter teaching through an alternative route did not perform statistically different from students of teachers who chose a traditional route to teaching. This finding was the same for those programs that required comparatively many as well as few hours of coursework. However, among those alternative route teachers who reported taking coursework while teaching, their students performed lower than their traditional counterparts.
Link: http://ies.ed.gov/ncee/pubs/20094043/index.asp
