State Teacher Policies Tied To Student Results

By Jeff Archer

A new study claims to have found evidence of what has long been something of a missing link in the quest for school improvement: ties between state policies on teacher quality and statewide student performance.

Carried out by Linda Darling-Hammond, an education professor at Stanford University, the analysis shows that a state's percentage of qualified teachers is one of the strongest predictors of its students' improvement on the National Assessment of Educational Progress. A paper based on the study is in this month's Education Policy Analysis Archives , an online journal based at Arizona State University's college of education.

"There does seem to be some interesting connections between the qualifications of teachers and the level of student achievement in states and between what states do as policy entities and their overall quality of teachers," said Michael S. Knapp, a professor of education and the director of the Center for the Study of Teaching and Policy at the University of Washington. "If those two links are...