The Mentors Matter Recruitment initiative leveraged state administrative data to recommend and successfully recruit more instructionally effective and experienced teachers to serve as clinical mentors, which, in turn, increased pre-service teachers' readiness to teach. Prior results, however, focus on self-reported outcomes and stem from a single…

Tennessee's State Board of Education developed Educator Diversity Policy 5.700 to promote the recruitment and retention of educators from different racial and ethnic backgrounds. Accordingly, districts throughout the state develop annual diversity goals that reflect the racial and ethnic diversity of their student population and strategies for…

Districts across the country are facing severe shortages of teachers--especially in certain subjects (math, science, special education, career and technical education, and bilingual education) and in specific schools (urban, rural, high-poverty, high-minority, and low-achieving). The severity of the teacher shortage problem varies significantly by…

The past decade has been marked by rapid changes in teacher evaluations. While many districts and states announced their intention to install better systems, they faced political and structural challenges. In this study, [National Council on Teacher Quality] NCTQ examines evidence of the impact of teacher evaluation in six places (four districts…

This report examines the ongoing effort to revamp teacher evaluations. After collecting and synthesizing data from 17 states and the District of Columbia, it provides five major lessons for policymakers. New evaluation systems are just one part of sweeping changes in American schools. Because the number and extent of these changes are daunting,…

Nobody goes into teaching to get rich, but that's no excuse not to pay teachers as professionals. Compensation is one of the most important factors in determining who enters the teaching profession and how long they stay--yet 90 percent of all U.S. school districts pay teachers without any regard for their actual performance with students,…

The purpose of this report is to describe what the authors learned from studying eight teacher career advancement initiatives implemented across a variety of contexts, including urban, suburban, and rural districts; high poverty and affluent districts; and in schools/districts both with and without strong union presence. They describe key…

Whether referred to as "pay-for-performance" (PFP) or "merit pay," attempting to tie educators' compensation to their performance in the classroom and students' performance on high-stakes tests has been a key component of many educator compensation reform efforts in the last five years. This issue looks at PFP systems broadly…

One of the most important things school systems can do to promote student achievement is to ensure that all students have effective teachers. Effective teachers may be particularly important for the most disadvantaged students. The U.S. Department of Education commissioned the American Institutes for Research (AIR) to create this report as a…

The U.S. Department of Education's "1999-2000 Schools and Staffing Survey" indicated that teacher shortages are 50 percent higher in urban schools than in suburban schools. Almost a third of the teachers leave the profession during the first three years and nearly half leave after five years. In schools serving low-income communities,…

The Tennessee education system has slowly introduced school-based management (SBM) or site based decision making (SBDM). This paper presents findings of a study that investigated Tennessee educators' perceptions of responsibility for teacher hiring. Data were obtained from a survey of 197 teachers, 22 principals, 13 district administrators, and 22…

To lure highly qualified teachers to low-performing schools, the Mobile County, Alabama, school board did what a small but growing number of districts are considering: pay teachers more money for working in what are considered less attractive jobs. As school districts are more pressured to raise achievement among all student groups, more are…

In 1987, the State Board of Education cited a shortage of minority teachers in Tennessee. In 1988, The Tennessee Task Force on the Supply of Minority Teachers issued several recommendations--most of which were implemented--to increase the number of minority teachers. In 1989, House Joint Resolution 36 also requested an annual report on the status…

This brief will highlight three major findings from Southeast Center for Teaching Quality (SECTQ's) teacher surveys and interviews with more than 160 educators entitled "Unfulfilled Promise: Ensuring High Quality Teachers for Our Nation's Students". It will also profile two districts' approaches to meeting the requirements of NCLB and…

Since the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act or the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) of 2001, much has been said and written about the law by a variety of education observers, practitioners, and policymakers from both sides of the political aisle. With support from the Ford, Rockefeller, and Z. Smith Reynolds foundations,…