Say what you want about the Bush family, but Jeb Bush did some good work in Florida in education reform and even those Jeb is gone, good things are still happening. I found this St. Petersburg Times story to be very interesting.

Out of the blue, the FCAT has a new job: measuring the programs across the state that produce teachers.

And it is already waving a red flag at the University of South Florida.

For the first time, the state Department of Education has examined the effectiveness of rookie teachers from a wide variety of teacher preparation programs, using their students' scores on the math and reading portions of the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test in 2008. It determined what percentage of graduates from each program had 50 percent or more of their students make a year's worth of progress.

USF's College of Education — a huge pipeline for teachers in the Tampa Bay area — had 76 percent of its graduates reach that bar, putting it ninth among the 10 state university programs.

Florida International University in Miami topped the field at 85 percent. The University of West Florida in Pensacola was last at 70 percent.

The data shows "there's room for improvement," said Michael Stewart, USF's associate dean for educator preparation. "Nobody's happy with 76 (percent) and I don't think we'd happy with the low 80s either. We're going to look at what's causing that."

If colleges of education aren't looking at test scores of their graduate's classes, how are they evaluating their programs? From what I understand, they mostly use surveys. They survey their students. They survey their student's principals. That just doesn't seem like a great evaluation process to me.

While the Florida method isn't perfect, I think it is a good compromise. It looks for the percentage of their graduates getting at least 50% of their students to make a year's progress. This seems to allow for "those kids" that some teachers complain about who won't or can't learn. It is a good start.

It is actually a little sad when you think about the reverse. For example, even Florida International University of Miami, who was the best according to this measure, has 24% of their graduates who can't even get half of their students to make a year's progress in a year. That's a sad state of affairs. Remember, that's the best program.

I'm very excited that at least they're starting to look at the success of their programs at the student level rather than just surveying the adults. That's great news. I hope that other states adopt measures like this. It is obvious that there is a lot of work to do in improving teacher education programs. Hopefully having better data will lead to better programs.