Charters Seen as Lab for Report's Ideas on Teachers
Differences in staffing practices at charter and traditional public schools attract scholars’ interest.
Devoting an entire section to the issue of teacher quality, the landmark 1983 report A Nation at Risk laid out seven recommendations for staffing practices aimed at ensuring that “superior teachers can be rewarded, average ones encouraged, and poor ones either improved or terminated.”
Charter schools—unfettered by some of the bureaucratic constraints of traditional public schools—are theoretically in a good position to use just the sorts of tactics the report’s authors thought were needed for hiring and maintaining a high-quality teaching staff. Charter administrators are often freer to fire subpar teachers, for instance, or offer higher pay to job candidates with greater subject-matter expertise.
Yet whether that freedom has translated to a better-quality teaching force for charter schools remains an open, and...
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