Background/Context: Questions about teacher quality, including how teachers ought to be educated and licensed, rank near the top of the educational agenda in the United States. These controversies persist because of lack of consensus about what "teacher quality" means, conflicting claims about the empirical evidence, and public skepticism about…

The work and lives of teachers have always been subject to external influence as those who are nearing the end of their careers will attest, but it is arguable that what is new over the last two decades is the pace, complexity, and intensity of change as governments have responded to the shrinking world of economic competitiveness and social…

Today's engineering graduates will solve tomorrow's problems in a world that is advancing faster and facing more critical challenges than ever before. This situation creates significant demand for engineering education to evolve in order to effectively prepare a diverse community of engineers for these challenges. Such concerns have led to the…

Teacher education has been subject to both scathing criticism and innumerable efforts designed to reform it or to save it from being dismantled. One of the latest and most well funded efforts aimed at teacher education reform is boldly titled Teachers for a New Era (TNE). Eleven colleges and universities of various types nationwide were selected…

Value-added modeling (VAM) to estimate school and teacher effects is currently of considerable interest to researchers and policymakers. Recent reports suggest that VAM demonstrates the importance of teachers as a source of variance in student outcomes. Policymakers see VAM as a possible component of education reform through improved teacher…