This "Informed Educator" looks at recent research on teacher opinions about their working conditions to address the question "what matters to teachers?" District and school leaders can use this information to strengthen their efforts to recruit and retain high-quality teachers and, in addition, better support teacher efforts to educate students.…

Much of the conversation in recent years about how to attract and retain high-quality teachers has focused on salaries--how much teachers are paid, the possibilities of differentiated pay scales, and pay for performance. But it has become increasingly clear that teachers take much more than salary into account when tallying up working conditions.…

Summarized in this report are the responses of the 1,222 public school teachers who participated in the 1987 Educator Opinion Poll (43 percent of the national sample). The survey instrument included both questions eliciting the opinions of teachers and questions about their status and experiences. Opinion questions covered such topics as the lead…