US education policy should reduce its emphasis on the entering characteristics of teachers and insist instead that teacher quality be determined by the fruits of teachers’ work: Student outcomes. Under the headline “From Qualifications to Results: Promoting Teacher Effectiveness Through Federal Policy” (28 January 2009), Robin Chait presents the case for stressing alternative ways of promoting teacher effectiveness.
Federal law should stop focusing on “quality,” as measured by front-end qualifications, and start focusing on “effectiveness,” as measured by whether teachers have actually helped students learn. Research now shows that most qualifications only weakly predict whether teachers will succeed in the classroom, and one of the best predictors of future performance is past performance. This means that increasing the share of teachers who are high performers will be a straighter path to improving student achievement than focusing on credentials.
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