On January 12, 2006, the Houston Independent School District (HISD) Board of Education approved a teacher performance-pay program awarding teachers financial incentives based on three indicators of performance pay. These indicators involved group performance for teachers based on campus second grade comparative growth in mathematics and reading…

Staffing problems are pervasive in certain subject areas, such as secondary math and science and special education, where the combination of training requirements and relatively high alternative wages makes it difficult to attract and retain high-quality teachers. This project evaluated the impacts of the Florida Critical Teacher Shortage Program…

A hefty body of evidence documents the phenomenon of "summer learning loss," but consensus on the attributes of effective summer intervention, especially when it comes to access to high-quality teaching for students most at risk of falling behind, is only starting to emerge. Now, though, a handful of districts are beginning to wrestle with the…

Research on teacher quality is not definitive. But, we know that developing high-quality teachers requires a multipronged approach: We need to recruit promising teachers. We need to retain and reward effective early career teachers. We need mechanisms to dismiss those who don't improve. We need to focus teacher preparation on the foundations of…

The effective initial preparation and ongoing support of teachers of students who are deaf and hard of hearing has always been a difficult and controversial task. Changes in student demographic characteristics and educational settings, combined with the rapidly diminishing number and diversity of deaf education teacher preparation (DETP) programs,…

Public Impact asked a simple question: "Will our nation's boldest efforts to recruit more top teachers and remove the least effective teachers put an excellent teacher in every classroom?" They ran the numbers and discovered the disappointing answer: No. But that's not the end of the story. With a change in schools' strategies, they realized, 87…

Thanks to increasingly meaningful teacher evaluations, far more is now known about the effectiveness of teachers in public school classrooms. What should states, districts, and schools do with that knowledge? In policy debates, much of the attention has focused on teachers at the "ineffective" end of the spectrum. With better teacher evaluation,…

Teacher quality experts are urging policymakers to identify and target expert teachers and entice them to teach in high-needs schools. To understand what this might take, expert teachers in Arizona were surveyed to understand their job-related preferences to inform future recruitment policies. Findings should inform others about the important…

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…

Authors and co-directors of "Public Impact," Emily Ayscue Hassel and Bryan C. Hassel state that, looking back over the decades, no one is really getting what they want. Teachers are no closer to achieving the societal respect and substantial, sustainable rewards for their contributions that they deserve, and student achievement has…

Purpose: One bad hiring decision can lead to low student achievement. Research supports that teachers are the most influential factor in student success. As a result, principals' current practice of hiring teachers based on intuition and likeability must change. Given the current high stakes era, principals need reassurance that the teachers they…

The Pittsburgh Public Schools study is the 12th district study since the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) began studying districts in-depth in 2009. The intent of these studies is to give select communities a comprehensive look at what is happening in their local school districts that may be either helping or hurting teacher quality, and…

American schools are in a constant, unending race to recruit and then retain some 300,000 teachers annually. Given that U.S. colleges issue a grand total of perhaps 1.5 million four-year diplomas a year across all majors and disciplines, even non-mathematicians can see that the K-12 schools are seeking to recruit about one in five new college…

The current wave of new teacher evaluation systems around the country offers an opportunity to broaden the conversation surrounding teacher effectiveness and its relationship to school coherence, to look at how schools and school systems might take a more integrated and intentional approach to attracting, training, and managing high-quality…

In recent years, Teach for America (TFA) has placed thousands of high-achieving college graduates in hard-to-staff schools, and its popularity continues to grow. TFA thus represents an anomaly: it attracts higher education's top students to primary and secondary education's least desired jobs. This article reviews the current explanations for…