Federal lawmakers should shift their teacher-quality focus from front-end qualifications to supporting state and district efforts to measure and identify effective teachers based on student-performance outcomes, a paper from the Washington-based Center for American Progress argues.
The report recommends that, as part of the reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act, the federal government should include grants to enable states to improve their data capacity and assessment quality and create valid and reliable “value added” systems for estimating teacher effects.
The authors also call on federal lawmakers to create competitive grants to help states and districts reform teacher pay, evaluation, placement and tenure systems; and enhance alternative-certification programs. The report advocates a pilot federal program to explore pathways toward teacher certification based on measures of teacher effectiveness.
