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Research Resources

The Project on the Next Generation of Teachers at the Harvard Graduate School of Education - The Project on the Next Generation of Teachers, directed by Susan Moore Johnson, is a multi-year research project addressing critical questions regarding the future of our nation's teaching force. The Project examines issues related to attracting, supporting, and retaining quality teachers in U.S. public schools.

Beyond Protect and Defend: An Agenda for AACTE for the 21st Century
AACTE ( February 17, 2005 )
Summary: 2005 Charles W. Hunt Memorial Lecture - David G. Imig, AACTE President and CEO.

California's Hidden Teacher Spending Gap: How State and District Budgeting Practices Shortchange Poor and Minority Students and Their Schools
Education Trust (February 15, 2005)
Summary: This new report by the Education Trust-West reveals the discrepancies in spending on teacher salaries between schools within the same district that serve a high percentage of poor and minority students and those serving higher-income and White students.

Qualified Teachers for At-Risk Schools: A National Imperative
Educational Testing Service (February 09, 2005)
Summary: This report reviews the status of efforts nationally to address the quality of teaching in at-risk schools, summarizes the research and calls for the issue to be a national imperative.

How States Are Responding to the Nation's Goal of Placing a Highly Qualified Teacher in Every Classroom
The National Council on Teacher Quality (December 31, 2004)
Summary: This report, the second in a series published by the National Council on Teacher Quality, examines states' progress in meeting the new federal requirement that by the end of the 2005 - 2006 school year there will be a “highly qualified teacher” in every classroom in the nation.

Is National Board Certification An Effective Signal of Teacher Quality?
The CNA Corporation (December 06, 2004)
Summary: The present study uses data from a large urban school district to examine the association between student gains in mathematics in the ninth and tenth grades, National Board Certification (NBC), and other indicators of teacher quality. Based on a variety of different specifications and student subsamples, we find robust evidence that NBC is an effective indicator of teacher quality.

Increasing the Odds: How Good Policies Can Yield Better Teachers
The National Council on Teacher Quality ( December 01, 2004 )
Summary: This report highlights the factors that truly do have an impact on the quality of our nation's teachers, incorporating the most recent, responsible research.

Quality Teaching Initiatives in Kentucky: A Progress Report
National Commission on Teaching and America's Future (November 31, 2004)
Summary: This report provides an overview of the progress Kentucky has made and the work that remains to be done if the state is to ensure that every student is to be taught by a competent, qualified, effective teacher. The report focuses specifically on four areas: Compensation; Teacher Education and Preparation; Teacher Recruitment and Retention; and Professional Development. Together, these address the elements that educators, advocates, and policymakers have concluded are critical to improving teacher quality.

Innovations in Education: Alternative Routes to Teacher Certification
Department of Education (November 30, 2004)
Summary: This publication, published by the Department's Office of Innovation and Improvement, identifies concrete, real-world examples of innovations in alternate routes to teacher certification.

Teacher Perceptions of the Work Environment
Education Commission of the States (November 30, 2004)
Summary: In May 2003, an Education Commission of the States (ECS) report titled Where They Are Needed Most: Recruiting and Retaining High-Quality Teachers in North Carolina's Hard-to-Staff and Low-Performing Schools identified 272 “hard-to-staff” schools and evaluated the impact of various education policies on teachers in these schools. This analysis incorporates data from state and federal sources to show whether school characteristics and teacher perceptions of the work environment in hard-to-staff schools differ from those in schools not considered (“nondesignated”) as hard to staff.

Teacher Working Conditions are Student Learning Conditions
Southeast Center for Teaching Quality (November 15, 2004)
Summary: While business often focuses on employee satisfaction, many schools struggle to address critical working conditions — isolating teachers in classrooms with closed doors, denying them basic materials to do their job, inundating them with non-instructional duties, providing them with little input into the design and organization of schools, and offering little opportunity for career advancement and professional growth.

The Support Gap: New Teachers' Early Experiences in High-Income and Low-Income Schools
Education Policy Analysis Archives (October 29, 2004)
Summary: In this article, the authors consider three sources of support for new teachers—hiring practices, relationships with colleagues, and curriculum—all found in earlier research to influence new teachers' satisfaction with their work, their sense of success with students, and their eventual retention in their job. They find that a "support gap" exists: new teachers in low-income schools are less likely than their counterparts in high-income schools to experience timely and information-rich hiring, to benefit from mentoring and support by experienced colleagues, and to have a curriculum that is complete and aligned with state standards, yet flexible for use in the classroom.

Teacher Education: Scan of Issues, Roles, Activities, and Resources
American Association of State Colleges and Universities ( September 30, 2004 )
Summary: A brief overview of five interrelated topics pertaining to teachers: teacher preparation, licensure and certification, employment issues, professional development, and accountability.

Teacher Education Initiatives: Value-Added Teacher Preparation Program Assessment Model
Louisiana Board of Regents (09 15, 2004)
Summary: The Board of Regents is currently testing the use of a new Value-Added Teacher Preparation Program Assessment Model that will have the capacity to examine the growth of achievement of children and link growth in student learning to teacher preparation programs.

Leading for Learning 2004
Education Week ( September 15, 2004 )
Summary: After years of hearing that a principal's main job should be to raise the quality of instruction, districts and states are experimenting with ways to make that ideal a reality.

National Board Certified Teachers and Their Students' Achievement
Education Policy Analysis Archives ( September 08, 2004 )
Summary: In this study we compare the academic performance of students in the elementary classrooms of 35 National Board Certified teachers and their non-certified peers, in 14 Arizona school districts. Board Certified teachers and their principals provide additional information about these teachers and their schools.

Chronic Teacher Turnover in Urban Elementary Schools
Education Policy Analysis Archives (August 16, 2004)
Summary: This study examines the characteristics of elementary schools that experience chronic teacher turnover and the impacts of turnover on a school's working climate and ability to effectively function.

Interrogating the Generalizability of Portfolio Assessments of Beginning Teachers: A Qualitative Study
Education Policy Analysis Archives ( July 20, 2004 )
Summary: This qualitative study is intended to illuminate factors that affect the generalizability of portfolio assessments of beginning teachers.

Tapping the Potential: Retaining and Developing High-Quality New Teachers
Alliance for Excellent Education ( June 31, 2004 )
Summary: American schools spend more than $2.6 billion annually replacing teachers who have dropped out of the teaching profession. Tapping the Potential cites comprehensive induction, especially in a teacher's first two years on the job, as the single effective strategy to stem the rapidly increasing teacher attrition rate.

Effects of Teach For America on Students: Findings from a National Evaluation
Mathematical Policy Research, Inc. (June 16, 2004)
Summary: Improving teacher preparation and training are critical elements of federal education reform initiatives, but teacher shortages and the need to find highly qualified candidates are complicating these efforts. Our Teach For America study, the first national evaluation of the impact of the program, compared the performance of TFA and non-TFA teachers in selected high-poverty schools.

Necessary and Insufficient: Resisting A Full Measure Of Teacher Quality
The National Council on Teacher Quality ( April 23, 2004 )
Summary: For all the conflict generated by various K-12 education reform efforts, there is one principle everyone agrees on: teachers need to know the subject matter they teach. This principle makes sense to parents, educators, and policy makers alike.

Where We Stand on Teacher Quality
Educational Testing Service ( April 23, 2004 )
Summary: This is the first in a series of issue papers from ETS on improving the quality of the teacher workforce in the United States . The paper addresses aspects of teacher quality that we believe are important. Some are based on compelling research; others, in the absence of hard data, on our own experience and on the best available professional judgment.

The Real Value of Value-Added: Getting Effective Teachers to the Students Who Need Them Most
Education Trust (April 16, 2004)
Summary: The paper lays out an ambitious policy agenda, premised on an exhaustive review of the existing research on teacher effectiveness—often referred to as “value-added.” That research, which has been conducted over the past decade in Tennessee , Texas , and several big city school districts, confirms what parents have always known: teachers have the biggest impact on student achievement.

Reform Ideals and Teachers' Practical Intentions
Education Policy Analysis Archives (April 07, 2004)
Summary: Reformers have been trying for decades to alter the fundamental character of classroom instruction in the United States, but have repeatedly been unsuccessful in fostering significant change in teaching practice.

Policymaker's Primer on Education Research
Education Commission of the States ( March 08, 2004 )
Summary: The goal of this Policymaker's Primer on Education Research is to help policymakers and other interested individuals answer three big questions: What does the research say? Is the research trustworthy? How can the research be used to guide policy?

Can Teacher Quality Be Effectively Assessed?
Center on Reinventing Public Education (March 05, 2004)
Summary: Utilizing a sophisticated value-added model built from 600,000 North Carolina elementary student test scores during a 3-year period, an independent research team has found that National Board Certified Teachers (NBCT's) are far more likely to improve student achievement as measured by the state's highly touted standardized testing system.

Questions about Valid Uses of Value-Added Assessment
Southeast Center for Teaching Quality (January 31, 2004)
Summary: Through analyzing methods and sample data published by developers of the Tennessee Value- Added Assessment system (TVAAS), a researcher discovers questions and potential hazards associated with the use of TVAAS for measuring teacher effectiveness.

Teaching at Risk: A Call to Action
The Teaching Commission (January 15, 2004)
Summary: The Teaching Commission, a blue-ribbon panel of 19 leaders in government, business, philanthropy, and education, today announced a strategy to fundamentally upgrade teaching as a profession by changing the way teachers come into the field, as well as the way they are trained, assessed, supported, and compensated.

Teachers Voices Interpreting Standards: Compromising Teachers Autonomy or Raising Expectations and Performances?
Education Policy Analysis Archives ( November 18, 2003 )
Summary: The State of Virginia has adopted state-mandated testing that aims to raise the standards of performance for children in our schools in a manner that assigns accountability to schools and to teachers. In this paper we argue that the conditions under which the standards were created and the testing implemented undermine the professionalism of teachers.

A Qualified Teacher in Every Classroom - Appraising Old Answers and New Ideas
American Enterprise Institute ( October 24, 2003 )
Summary: The training and licensing of teachers has always been a contentious political and policy issue. Recent years have seen increasingly heated debate about the value of teacher licensure and certification and whether certification ensures a highly qualified teacher corps.

Missed Opportunities: How We Keep High-Quality Teachers Out of Urban Schools
The New Teacher Project (September 15, 2003)
Summary: The report shows that late hiring timelines cause urban districts to lose many of their best-qualified candidates.

Teacher Quality: Understanding the Effectiveness of Teacher Attributes
Economic Policy Institute (August 22, 2003)
Summary: The author Jennifer King Rice examines the body of research on the subject of teacher quality to draw conclusions about which attributes makes teachers most effective, with a focus on aspects of teacher quality that can be translated into policy recommendations and incorporated into teaching practice.

Requirements for an Assessment Procedure for Beginning Teachers: Implications from Recent Theories on Teaching and Assessment
TCRecord (08 21, 2003)
Summary: The purpose of the study was to determine the best approach to the development of procedures to assess beginning teachers. Recent conceptions of teaching and new approaches to assessment were examined for the implications for the development of teacher assessments. A framework consisting of fifteen implications is proposed.

Eight Questions on Teacher Preparation: What Does the Research Say?
Education Commission of the States (08 01, 2003)
Summary: This ECS report reviews the body of research on teacher preparation to ascertain what evidence the research truly provides and what its implications are for policy.

National Crisis or Localized Problems?
Education Policy Analysis Archives (July 31, 2003)
Summary: This article attempts to estimate the size and nature of the celebrated teacher shortage of the late 1990s by using data from the U.S. Department of Education's 1999-00 School and Staffing Survey.

Data Systems to Enhance Teacher Quality
State Higher Education Executive Officers ( July 31, 2003 )
Summary: This report finds that states lack the necessary integrated teacher data systems to create and improve policy.

Meeting the Highly Qualified Teachers Challenge
Department of Education ( July 16, 2003 )
Summary: The Secretary's Second Annual Report on Teacher Quality.

Stand by Me: What Teachers Really Think About Unions, Merit Pay and Other Professional Matters
Public Agenda ( July 16, 2003 )
Summary: Public school teachers say they love their work and are confident in their ability to reach most students. But a majority feels that they are unfairly being held accountable when so much that affects learning is beyond their control.

Creating Working Conditions So Teachers Can Help All Students Achieve
Southeast Center for Teaching Quality (July 01, 2003)
Summary: As states grapple with the teaching quality requirements of No Child Left Behind, many policymakers are turning their attention not only to recruiting teachers but also to retaining them.

Preparing Teachers Around the World
Educational Testing Service (May 01, 2003)
Summary: This international study compares and contrasts teacher education and certification policies in the United States with those in Australia, England, Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, the Netherlands, and Singapore.

Achieving More: Quality Teaching, School Leadership, Student Success
Ohio Governor's Commission on Teaching Success (April 22, 2003)
Summary: Just as students in Ohio are expected to meet state standards for what they need to learn, teachers in the Buckeye State should have a set of teaching standards to guide how they teach, this report recommends.

Faculty are the Backbone: Quality Control in Connecticut's Alternate Route to Certification
Harvard Graduate School of Education (April 01, 2003)
Summary: In response to teacher shortages and the anticipated demand, state and district policymakers have implemented policies designed to quickly bring new candidates into teaching. One such approach is alternative teacher certification, which offers training and supervision to candidates with little or no prior teaching experience (Fideler & Haselkorn, 1999; Hawley, 1990). Though alternative certification programs differ significantly, most offer abbreviated preparation and expeditious entry into classrooms (Hawley, 1990).

Performance-Based Compensation Can Help Transform Teacher Development
Southeast Center for Teaching Quality ( April 01, 2003 )
Summary: This article is the first in a two-part series exploring the idea of differentiated compensation for teachers.

New Teachers' Experiences of Hiring: Preliminary Findings from a Four-State Study
Harvard Graduate School of Education (April 01, 2003)
Summary: Research on beginning teachers suggests that more than a third are hired after the school year starts, and that most are jumping into jobs where they are expected to shoulder the same responsibilities as their more experienced colleagues.

Integrated Professional Culture: Exploring New Teachers' Experiences in 4 States
Harvard Graduate School of Education (April 01, 2003)
Summary: Research on beginning teachers suggests that more than a third are hired after the school year starts, and that most are jumping into jobs where they are expected to shoulder the same responsibilities as their more experienced colleagues.

No Dream Denied: A Pledge to America's Children
National Commission on Teaching and America 's Future ( January 31, 2003 )
Summary: The conventional wisdom is that we lack enough good teachers. The truth is we can't keep enough teachers. The real school staffing problem is teacher retention. Our inability to support high quality teaching in many of our schools is driven by too many teachers leaving for other jobs.

How do Teachers learn to Teach Effectively? Quality Indicators from Quality Schools
Southeast Center for Teaching Quality (January 01, 2003)
Summary: Throughout 2002, the Southeast Center for Teaching Quality and Just for the Kids, Inc. worked together in a unique effort to document how teachers learn to teach effectively and to identify school and teaching quality indicators that can improve current state accountability systems.