Urban school districts often rely on alternative teacher certification programs to help address ongoing demands for recruiting and hiring qualified teachers. These programs offer pathways into teaching outside of traditional university-based teacher education programs. This report summarizes a multi-year evaluation of the implementation and impacts of one of those programs, ...
Student learning objectives (SLOs) have emerged as a novel approach to measuring student growth, particularly for the majority of educators not covered by a state standardized assessment. This report offers some ideas for states and districts that are considering the use of SLOs to measure student growth, including a basic ...
In this commentary published in the Hill, Dan Goldhaber, AIR vice president and director of CALDER, and John C. White, Louisiana state superintendent of education, discuss the importance of formal mentoring for teachers during their career training.
Given the rapid policy diffusion of the edTPA, a performance-based, subject-specific assessment of teacher candidates, it is surprising that there is currently no existing large-scale research linking it to outcomes for inservice teachers and their students. This report uses longitudinal data from Washington State that include information on teacher candidates’ ...
American education is undergoing considerable change from improvements in information technology to increased efforts to tie teacher performance to student achievement. This thought paper proposes steps to embrace that change, primarily through fundamentally reconsidering the teacher’s role in education. ...
For years, education leaders have sought to pinpoint how teachers become effective in order to better leverage teachers’ impact on student learning and improve student outcomes. This report describes the characteristics of teacher leaders, the roles teacher leaders take in improving teacher practice, and the supports and barriers to teacher ...
Recognizing that human capital is the most important asset to teaching and learning, states and districts are rethinking their approaches to evaluating teachers’ performance. This white paper is intended to assist states and districts in strategically combining measures into a summative score in a way that reflects their goals and ...
What impact do Teach for America (TFA) members have on other teachers' performance? A strategy to "cluster" TFA members in high-need schools contributed to large gains in math achievement, but was found to have little effect on reading skills and no spillover effect on other teachers.
A significant number of educator compensation reform efforts are underway throughout the country. The purpose of this report is to assist the stakeholders in alternative compensation initiatives to better understand the ways in which they can structure performance incentives in the context of their intended outcomes, local culture, and available ...
Student Learning Objectives (SLOs) have recently come to the forefront as a potential solution for measuring student growth, particularly for educators in subjects or grades not covered by a state standardized assessment. This paper discusses the steps for using SLOs as a measure of growth, identifies key considerations for successful ...