The report, An Evaluation of Teachers Trained Through Different Routes to Certification, compares the achievement of elementary school students in the same grade, at the same school who were randomly assigned to teachers who chose to be trained through different routes to certification – traditional education school routes 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 teachers coming from those programs that required comparatively many as well as few hours of coursework; however, among those teachers who reported taking coursework while teaching, their students performed lower than their counterparts.

go to the website: http://ies.ed.gov/ncee/pubs/20094043/index.asp