Teacher Quality and Student Achievement (continued)

11.  What are the effects of alternate routes of teacher certification?

Although many states and districts offer alternative teaching certificates to college graduates who want to teach but lack education school credentials, the research community is divided on the effects of traditional versus alternate certification. One problem is that alternate routes to teaching can take many forms across different states and districts, making it difficult to generalize findings.

There is one high-profile alternate route initiative that has a national reach—Teach for America (TFA). TFA is a competitive program that places top college graduates in high-needs districts. Two recent studies of TFA teachers show mixed results: one finds that TFA teachers produce better student results than other alternate route teachers. Another study confirms those results but finds that TFA teachers did not perform as well as new teachers with pedagogical training and traditional certificates.

Alternate routes continue to be a popular response to teacher shortages. Therefore, more studies are needed to identify the best ways to make them effective.

12.  What is the potential of professional development as a strategy to improve teacher quality?

There is growing consensus that effective professional development can improve teacher quality, but it is important to recognize that this consensus is not yet supported by rigorous research on what constitutes “effective.” While studies show individual cases where professional development programs lead to improved instructional practices, the research on professional development has not identified development programs that have widespread success.

Nonetheless, practitioners and researchers do agree on four characteristics of professional development that are most likely to have the greatest impact on practice.

• Extends over long periods of time.

• Engages teachers as active learners.

• Focuses on combining content and pedagogy.

• Includes opportunities for practice, feedback, and reflection rather than one-day workshops.

• Currently, most teachers have no access to this kind of professional development on a regular basis, making it a ripe area for state and district teacher improvement plans. 

13.  What are some of the problems districts may encounter in their effort to recruit and retain the best teachers in the most challenging schools?

Although districts must recognize that efforts to assign and retain teachers in more challenging schools may be difficult, they must be willing—over the long term—to commit necessary resources to address this challenge in a comprehensive manner. Recruitment and retention for needy schools requires a three-prong strategy.

• Recruitment of top teacher candidates.

• Incentives and prestige to attract the best teachers where they’re most needed.

• Ongoing professional development to improve the effectiveness of current faculty. 

Districts must recognize that it is not enough to simply sprinkle a few good teachers in low-performing schools or leave them to work in isolation. All teachers work better with extensive support and strong leadership in their schools.

Community engagement is also crucial to initiating and sustaining efforts to raise teacher quality in the neediest schools. Likely challenges include the disapproval of politically influential parents who have children enrolled in more affluent, high-performing schools; teacher ire, resistance, and ultimately, resignations; and the reality that there may be too few teachers in the district who currently possess the desirable attributes to make a noticeable difference in the achievement gap.

While some initiatives that rely on incentives to recruit teachers for hard-to-staff schools have met with limited success, others have begun to have an impact. It is important to continue these experiments and complement them with a range of other programs and policy initiatives that include mechanisms to bolster the skills of current teaching staff.