Introduction

Research increasingly demonstrates what common sense has long made apparent to educators and parents: Teacher quality matters -- a lot. Teachers' knowledge and skills are the most vital in-school factors influencing children's learning. And, for children from disadvantaged backgrounds or troubled home environments, quality teaching is even more important.

Unfortunately, the quality of America's public school teaching force is neither as good as it could be nor as good as it must be to prepare our children for a global economy. Certainly, the nation has thousands of highly skilled, dedicated teachers. But, since the 1960s, the quality of the teaching profession has declined. Even more troubling, there are huge teacher quality disparities between poor and affluent schools. Disadvantaged children -- those who most need excellent teachers -- are the least likely to have them.

It is time for policymakers to realize that the status quo methods of improving teacher quality simply do not work. Many of the old solutions favored by education groups to improve teacher quality -- such as raising teacher salaries across the board, improving training, and requiring certification -- have not fixed the problem. Indeed, one of the most popular education policy proposals of recent years, cutting class sizes, risks unintentionally lowering teacher quality even further, as affluent districts make up their numbers by poaching the most capable teachers from poorer areas.

The trouble is that these status quo solutions do not focus on the real problem driving declines in teacher quality: an outdated preparation and compensation scheme that demands and rewards the wrong things, and that provides too few growth opportunities to attract highly skilled individuals to teaching in sufficient numbers. Without bottom-up reform of the fundamental assumptions of our current teacher preparation and compensation regimes, neither the old policies, nor the promises of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) to place a highly qualified teacher in every classroom, can have much success.

There is a better way. Policymakers can draw on the latest performance data and research to craft effective policies that reward and attract highly skilled teachers. Regular testing, as mandated by NCLB, allows researchers and policymakers to track student achievement over time and link results to teachers. By measuring test score gains from one year to the next, researchers and administrators can better determine the characteristics and conditions that lead to effective teaching. That will allow policymakers to reward teachers who do a better job in the classroom, taking into account the composition of their student body. In addition, a new stream of labor market research provides insight into how and why individuals decide to enter or leave the teaching profession and where they choose to teach.

This paper analyzes promising new research about teacher quality and the incentives for teachers to do better. We assess current teacher quality approaches and offer recommendations to help policymakers modernize how teachers are prepared, hired, evaluated, and compensated. Among the most promising solutions are:

• Carefully designing systems of performance-based teacher pay;
• Rewarding teachers who choose to work in the schools that need them most; and
• Streamlining or expediting certification requirements to expand the pool of individuals who can be hired as teachers.

While the research evidence for modernizing teacher preparation and certification is clear, the politics are more challenging. Established interests with a stake in the status quo arrangements of educating, paying, and assigning teachers oppose reforms that interfere with their established prerogatives. But unless policymakers are willing to tackle these tough politics, we will continue to condemn millions of disadvantaged children to an inadequate education and run the risk of undermining our nation's future economic competitiveness.