States and school districts have made significant investments in systems to measure teacher performance, with the ultimate goal of improving student learning. In this report, AIR experts share their findings from the two-year Beyond Accountability project, in which four school districts identified a specific problem of practice and used plan-do-study-act ...
Is adopting academic standards and increasing pressure on teachers has made it more difficult to attract academically talented people into teaching? Not according to Dan Goldhaber, who cites his own research in this blog post, showing that the average SAT score of college graduates who went on to become teachers ...
Exclusionary school discipline policies once instituted to prevent serious infractions have crept into discipline practices for minor issues. Youth who participated in a roundtable on the subject contend that it limits opportunities to learn and compromises academic achievement; is applied disproportionately and subjectively; and deprives students of the ...
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 ...