From Highly Qualified to High Quality: An Imperative for Policy and Research to Recast the Teacher Mold

Abstract

INTRODUCTION One of the most enduring and compelling issues that has attracted the attention of education researchers and policy makers is the issue of how best to invest in teacher quality. In fact, approximately one-third of the papers presented at the 2007 American Education Finance Association (AEFA) conference were dedicated to research on teacher issues. The attention given to teachers as an education input is not surprising. We know that teachers are the single most expensive and the single most important resource provided to students. A quality teacher in every classroom is clearly a cornerstone for providing an adequate education for all students. However, not all students have access to effective teachers, and the current distribution of teachers poses serious problems for the equity, adequacy, and effectiveness of public education. In particular, urban schools serving large concentrations of high-poverty and low-achieving students face serious challenges with respect to staffing: they experience higher rates of turnover than their nonurban counterparts; the teachers they lose tend to have better qualifications than those who stay; and the teachers hired to fill the vacancies tend to be less experienced and less qualified than those they are replacing (Ingersoll 200; Lankford, Loeb, and Wyckoff 2002). In the end, these schools find themselves serving some of the highest need students with many of the lowest qualified teachers. Jennifer King Rice