The Associated Press

CLEVELAND - Ohio's 51 colleges and universities that train future teachers will collaborate on a $10 million project to identify what makes a good teacher.

The Ohio Partnership for Accountability program also will involve the Ohio Department of Education and the Ohio Board of Regents in a five-year analysis.

The project will track the performance of recent graduates of the state's education schools by looking at the English and math scores of the children they teach.

It also will look at the techniques of 25,000 new and veteran teachers and compare them to what education majors are learning in college.

"What a group of us deans said was, 'We're willing to take the challenge,"' said Thomas Lasley, dean of the University of Dayton's School of Education and Allied Professions and co-chairman of the partnership. "We've got tons of graduates, but no mechanism to assess the relative effectiveness of those teachers."

Ohio colleges awarded nearly 8,000 teaching degrees in 2001-2002, according to the Ohio Board of Regents.

Ohio's largest teacher unions, the Ohio Federation of Teachers and the Ohio Education Association, are cooperating on the Ohio project, which has attracted foundation and corporate backers.