Professional development and teacher education policies have the potential to greatly affect teachers' abilities to teach and, as a result, students' abilities to learn. States can play varied roles in the provision of teacher education and professional development. This policy brief summarizes...

The literature on effective schools emphasizes the importance of a quality teaching force in improving educational outcomes for students. In this article we use value-added methods to examine the relationship between a school's effectiveness and the recruitment, assignment, development, and...

The assertion that choice-driven competition between schools will improve school quality rests on several largely unexamined assumptions. One is that choice increases the competitive pressure experienced by school leaders. A second is that schools will seek to become more effective in response...

This article uses a game-theoretic, two-sided matching model and method of simulated moments estimation to study factors affecting the match of elementary teachers to their first jobs. We find that employers demonstrate preferences for teachers having stronger academic achievement (e.g.,...

This report addresses the comparison of teacher evaluation systems and proposes ways to achieve a uniform standard for dispensing funds to districts to recognize exceptional teachers without imposing a uniform evaluation system on those districts. The report provides practical procedures to...

Even as research has begun to document that teachers matter, there is less certainty about what attributes of teachers make the most difference in raising student achievement. Numerous studies have estimated the relationship between teachers' characteristics, such as work experience and academic...

Many large urban school districts are rethinking their personnel management strategies, often giving increased control to schools in the hiring of teachers, reducing, for example, the importance of seniority. If school hiring authorities are able to make good decisions about whom to hire, these...