Working in high schools, for example, I had never heard of “,” or the body of evidence against teaching young readers to use “contextual and syntactic clues” instead of phonics. But this research explained why the 17-year-old student who read “indignant” as “indifferent” continued to struggle when I instructed him to look at the letters in the word again.

 It also made sense that excessive was harmful and that having a in a random subject didn’t necessarily make someone a better teacher. I was glad to learn that researchers cared about these issues and that educational leaders could rely on serious evidence to inform their policies. 

I was also open to being persuaded by the evidence. As an English language arts teacher, I’d repeatedly been told that it didn’t really matter what books students were reading as long as they were learning the right skills. Research demonstrating the crucial role of content knowledge, however, cast my classroom experiences in a new light. I don’t regret introducing my students to engaging young adult novels, but I do wish we had spent more time on “classic” texts. 

But what never sat right with me was the research community’s prevalent view that a teacher’s experience didn’t make much difference after the first few years. Some decades ago, several empirical studies failed to detect significant gains after three to five years of teaching. What emerged from these findings was an oversimplified narrative that teachers’ abilities simply plateau after the initial learning curve. “Once somebody has taught for three years,” Bill Gates, “their teaching quality does not change thereafter.”&�Բ�����;

Of course, some teachers stop improving. That’s true of professionals in any field. But the idea that most teachers are as effective after 15 years on the job as they are after three to five is entirely at odds with my experience. 

During my six years as a high school teacher — with a backdrop of six years teaching college undergrads — I felt myself improve in myriad ways. Some of the biggest changes were indeed during the first few years. Early feedback from supervisors helped me foster more substantive discussions and better align my end-of-class assessments to the learning objectives. 

But other things took more time. I developed organizational systems that worked for me. I continued to refine my approach with students, finding that balance between approachable and serious. I got better at anticipating student misconceptions and knowing which explanations would be most likely to land. 

The most experienced teachers whom I observed also did these things — and many more that are tough to reduce to a single sentence. Having been in the classroom longer, they had simply encountered more situations to inform their decision-making in the present. 

Students getting heated arguing in class? Based on what had (and hadn’t) worked before, highly experienced teachers smoothly de-escalated. Revisiting related ideas across course units? Years of familiarity with the curriculum helped them notice patterns, understand student perceptions, and weave together content. Possible red flags around new behaviors or trends? These teachers had longstanding relationships with staff and faculty across the school, equipping them to communicate questions and concerns efficiently and often nipping problems in the bud as a result. 

Reflecting these realities, recent empirical research complicates the longstanding three-to-five-year-plateau narrative. As detailed in from the Learning Policy Institute and my own organization, the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, teachers improve most quickly in their first few years, but they continue to improve for up to two decades into their careers. 

This doesn’t mean that every experienced teacher will be better than every new-ish colleague, but rather that teachers tend to improve compared to their own prior performance. All this is especially true when teachers work in collaborative environments (can confirm!) and have consistent teaching assignments (sounds dreamy!). 

So what does that mean in practical terms? 

For administrators and policymakers, the biggest takeaway is that it’s worthwhile to ensure quality mentorships, professional learning and opportunities for collaboration. Where feasible, it makes sense to keep teachers with the same course assignments. Rotating grade levels might give teachers a breadth of knowledge, for example, but they’re going to be better equipped to educate students if they have a depth of course-specific knowledge. 

Perhaps most challenging to address is the unfortunate reality that the highest-need schools tend to have. There’s no silver bullet to address this complex phenomenon, but evidence suggests that improving, offering and creating career ladders can each help. 

Schools are complex places, and ultimately, no single study or perspective is adequate to guide policymaking. In the new year, education leaders should use insights from both research and practice to support teacher growth and retention and, in turn, improve student outcomes.

This is not a new finding, but Texas is actually doing something about it, by providing millions of dollars in school funding explicitly tied to teacher quality. The way Texas is doing it stands in contrast to past efforts and could be a model for other state and national policymakers.

During the Obama administration, state, district and federal leaders all seized on research on the importance of great teachers. One at the time found that high-quality educators can boost college outcomes and early-career earnings and even reduce the rate of teenage pregnancy.

But many of those policy efforts focused on the nuts and bolts of evaluating teacher quality, rather than using the results to drive personnel decisions. They became a top-down exercise in measurement and bureaucracy rather than a human capital tool. Predictably, that effort largely , and it kicked off a against federal education policy writ large and around teacher policy.

But over the last few years, Texas has slowly built a new approach that could be a path forward. The state is offering carrots, not sticks, as a way to get districts to behave differently. And it’s working. Not only is Texas offering its best teachers a lot more money, those educators are in the classroom in greater numbers.

It’s called the program. To qualify, districts submit their evaluation systems for state approval and explain how they will identify and a certain percentage of their teachers as outstanding, based on student growth — which may or may not include test scores — and classroom observations. The state then awards those districts extra money for each designated teacher.

Districts must use a validated observation rubric and evaluate educators at least annually. Under state , a “Master” teacher would perform at about the 95^th percentile, an “Exemplary” teacher between the 80th and 95^th percentiles and a “Recognized” teacher at the 67^th percentile or above.

After the state verifies a district’s evaluation process, it starts sending out . Each Recognized teacher earns at least $3,000 for his or her school, with higher amounts for Exemplary and Master teachers. Extra funding is awarded if the teacher works in a high-need or rural school. For example, a Master teacher in such a school could bring in an extra $32,000 a year. 

Critically, the money doesn’t flow to teachers directly, and districts have some flexibility in how they spend the funds. They can pass on the full amount to the designated teachers, or divide it among those teachers and other support staff at the same school. A district can also reserve up to 10% of the money to pay for professional development and other activities related to the designation system.

Once teachers earn a , they keep it for at least five years. If they change schools or districts, the money follows them. This gives them additional power. But, because the designations are worth more in higher-poverty schools, districts have an incentive to try to keep their designated teachers in their classrooms.

In addition to providing higher pay, this process is also a way for the state to acknowledge and thank great teachers. The state provides letters for districts to send to their designated teachers to notify them of both how much they earned for their school and how much extra they personally will receive.

Since its inception in 2018-19, Texas legislators have expanded the program and tinkered with its design. passed this year raised the dollar amounts for each designation, allowed districts to incorporate principals in the future and created a new category of “Acknowledged” educators, those at the 50^th percentile or above. The number of districts has also swelled, from 33 at the start to 597 last year — about half of all districts statewide. Importantly, the extra money seems to be helping to keep teachers in the classroom. Last year, 19% of all non-designated teachers their districts, compared with just 10% of the designated teachers.

Other states and federal policymakers could learn from the Texas approach. Rather than getting bogged down in the details of evaluation systems, it offers carrots to districts that are able to create systems that can meaningfully differentiate among their teachers. And, by putting real money behind it, the state is providing incentives for its best educators to work in the hardest-to-staff schools. Through its allotment program, Texas is raising the pay of its best teachers by thousands or tens of thousands of dollars each year, and sending a powerful signal that it values their work and wants them to continue teaching.

If this is the beginning of a trend, and not just a blip, it has huge implications for the education sector, as it raises questions about the kinds of jobs students are being prepared to do.

But even if this phenomenon proves short-lived — for example, if AI-driven innovation soon creates new, good-paying jobs for 22-year-olds — it presents those of us in K-12 education with a golden and very timely opportunity.

No, it’s not to replace teachers with AI. For most K-12 students, human interaction is likely to be as important as ever to helping them learn.

But what it may help us do — at least, create the opportunity for us to do — is recruit more of the most talented college graduates into teaching. Graduates who currently find themselves with fewer job opportunities.

That’s not pure conjecture. A in the prestigious Journal of Labor Economics found that teachers who entered the profession during recessions were unusually effective at boosting student achievement, especially in math. Back in 2019, co-author Marty West of Harvard told ����Ӱ�� that the number of excellent teachers is “strongly influenced by how attractive teaching is relative to other jobs”: 

When recessions wreak havoc on the private sector, the profession becomes a safe harbor for talented professionals — but as the economic picture brightens, promising candidates look elsewhere, and incumbent educators begin organizing for a better deal.

The country may or may not be heading into a tariff-related recession, but a down labor market for college graduates should provide much the same effect as far as turning the teaching profession into a safe harbor for young people who can’t land jobs elsewhere.

No doubt, not all smart college graduates will be great teachers. But the lesson from other tough labor markets is that the bigger the pool of prospective teachers, the higher the quality of those who end up in classrooms. 

Schools, districts and states might benefit from this AI-driven surge in teacher recruitment without lifting a finger. But if they wanted to supercharge the dynamic and eliminate teacher shortages altogether, there are specific actions they could take. And the sooner the better. Most importantly, they should raise the pay for new teachers. That’s do-able — but as Chad Aldeman argued recently, it can happen only if administrators start prioritizing teacher quality over teacher quantity — and increasing educators’ salaries over hiring all manner of non-teaching staff. That’s certainly not what schools have been doing in recent decades.

As student enrollment declines nationally and in many locations, schools also need to reduce the on their payrolls. Moving to thinner staffs and modestly larger class sizes would free up even more resources that could be plowed into higher salaries. As Eric Hanushek and Macke Raymond , such efforts have made a huge difference for students in Washington, D.C., and Dallas, especially when targeted at the best teachers in the neediest schools.

And while AI shouldn’t replace teachers, it might make them more efficient and effective — so much so that schools could do without quite as many teacher aides, administrative staffers and the rest of the army of people who now make up the .

There’s little doubt that AI is causing uncertainty, and probably disruption, in the labor market. That’s not great for young college graduates facing a foggy future. But it can be great for America’s K-12 students, if administrators and policymakers act fast.

About are unfilled or occupied by someone who is not fully certified. The numbers are starker in Texas, where were unlicensed. This isn’t just a staffing issue; it’s an educational emergency that demands a fundamental shift in how America regards teaching as a profession.

Unlike other career paths, such as medicine, law or engineering, teaching has never been fully professionalized. It is possible for an individual to walk into a classroom with minimal training and be called a teacher. 

True professionalization of teaching would require significant changes to the system, which features a hodgepodge of quick certification programs and temporary credentials across different states. Instead, every teacher should be required to complete comprehensive preparation that includes professional practice with expert feedback. This preparation period would be both rigorous and standardized — similar to medical residencies or legal clerkships — ensuring that all new teachers enter classrooms with proven skills to go along with their good intentions.

Professional teachers should also engage in continuous learning throughout their careers, which means regularly updating their skills and knowledge as new research emerges about effective educational methods. Schools should also offer clearer pathways for career advancement, making it easier for excellent teachers to take on leadership roles or mentor newcomers.

Outstanding classroom teaching requires sophisticated leadership and communication skills that take years to develop. The relative lack of ongoing training and career development for teachers once they’ve entered the classroom has created a vicious cycle where underprepared educators struggle in classrooms and leave the profession quickly. This creates more vacancies to be filled by people who also haven’t been sufficiently trained. 

Texas’ , signed by Gov. Greg Abbott on June 4 and taking effect in the fall, attempts to break this cycle by setting specific limits on how many uncertified teachers districts can employ. Starting in the 2026-27 school year, no more than 20% of a district’s teachers would be allowed to work without proper certification in core subjects. That percentage would drop each year until it reached just 5% by 2029-30. The law is a serious step toward treating teaching like the skilled profession it is.

It was critically important that the bill be passed and signed, because the consequences of the current system are devastating for students. 

In Texas, having an unprepared teacher is equivalent to missing over one-third of the school year: research shows that Texas students taught by new, uncertified teachers . Meanwhile, students taught by teachers who recently completed ’s rigorous preparation program . This is equivalent to gaining more than half a school year’s worth of learning in both subjects.

States facing similar shortages of qualified teachers in their classrooms should pay attention to Texas’ experiment and consider their own approaches to professionalizing teaching. The stakes are too high to continue with quick fixes and emergency measures.

Transforming teaching into a true profession would require a coordinated effort from multiple stakeholders. State governments must set and enforce rigorous certification standards while funding comprehensive preparation programs. School districts need to create supportive working environments that treat teachers as valuable professionals rather than interchangeable workers. Universities must redesign teacher preparation to emphasize practical skills and classroom experience. 

And the profession itself must embrace higher standards and accountability. Students deserve teachers who have been thoroughly prepared for the complex and important work of delivering a great education. 

For example, teachers in districts with the highest concentrations of poverty are almost three times more likely to be early in their career, with less than three years of experience. And students in these districts are 16 times more likely to learn from a teacher with temporary or emergency credentials than their peers in Michigan’s wealthiest school districts.

“The teacher shortage crisis that we hear a lot about here in Michigan is far worse for our students with the greatest needs,” said Jen DeNeal, director of policy and research at EdTrust-Midwest and lead author of the report. 

DeNeal noted that research shows that novice, not fully credentialed teachers are generally less effective in the classroom.

While the national teacher shortage in certain subjects has been as an intractable issue that’s worsened since the pandemic, the EdTrust study released last month uniquely zooms in on district-level data and demonstrates the scope of the problem.

“Having gaps is, of course, not a surprise,” said Michael Hansen, a senior fellow at the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution. “Having gaps of this magnitude is pretty stark.”

DeNeal and her team at EdTrust, which advocates for educational equity with a focus on children who have been traditionally underserved, spent two years analyzing educator workforce data from public and non-public sources, conducting focus groups and reviewing previous research.

They used Michigan’s a state funding formula passed in 2023 that includes an index for concentrations of poverty, to divide school districts into six bands. Band one includes districts with fewer than 20% of students living in concentrated poverty while band six includes districts where 85% to 100% of students live in these conditions. 

Researchers then looked at how highly qualified teachers — defined as those who were fully certified with more than three years of experience teaching in their certification or more refined speciality areas — were distributed across these districts.

They found that in the 2022-23 school year, more than 16% of teachers in high-poverty districts were teaching a subject or grade not listed on their license — that’s twice the state average. These districts accounted for more than a third of all out-of-field educators in the state, despite only employing 13.5% of Michigan teachers. 

While out-of-field teachers are typically a stop-gap resource preferable to a revolving door of substitutes, they may lack the content knowledge and skills needed to effectively teach, and students who learn from them tend to have in that subject. Those with emergency credentials are also able to fill teacher vacancies when more qualified ones aren’t available, though they’re more likely to be rated as when compared to other new teachers.

Hansen noted that being trained and fully licensed makes a teacher more likely to provide quality instruction in the classroom, but “it’s no guarantee.” And while these findings do likely point to a “more effective teacher workforce in these more affluent settings, and … a less effective workforce in the high-needs settings, it’s probably not the case that it’s going to be 16 times more effective.”

Yet, “of all these different factors and characteristics that they’re highlighting in this report, experience is the number one that’s documented to show an impact across multiple studies and multiple grades,” he added.

Persistent vacancies may be particularly hard to fill in Michigan, where teacher attrition is slightly worse than the national average, and teacher turnover is far higher for students living in poverty. For example Black students, who account for only 18% of the statewide student enrollment, make up 45% of where teachers were most likely to leave.

In districts where a majority of children are Black, students were nearly four times more likely to learn from an out-of-field teacher, four times more likely to learn from a teacher with emergency credentials and nearly twice as likely to learn from a beginning teacher than in districts serving primarily white students.

In focus groups, teachers pointed to a number of factors contributing to the shortage, including the pandemic, discipline challenges and chronic absenteeism. They also reported that their classrooms are overfilled, they have less one-on-one time with students and less planning time because they’re being called on to substitute teach. One issue, though, came up again and again: pay.

“We’re not competitive regionally and we’re not terribly competitive nationally,” DeNeal said.

Between Michigan’s inflation-adjusted teacher salary fell more than 20%, representing the second-largest teacher salary decline in the country. First-year teachers in Michigan earned, on average, about $39,000 a year, rendering it 39th nationally and last among Great Lake states. And researchers found that teachers in the wealthiest district are paid, on average, about $4,000 more annually than those in the poorest districts.

This is exactly the opposite of what the pay structure should look like, according to Dan Goldhaber, an education researcher at the American Institute of Research and the University of Washington. He argued that teachers in more challenging environments should be paid more than their peers to compensate for the additional hurdles.

“I don’t think this is an issue where we need a lot of research to know that this problem exists and to know at least what some of the potential solutions are,” he said. “This is an issue where the politics I think make it challenging to implement at least some of the solutions.”

DeNeal said that although these challenges are “troubling and extremely persistent, they are not insurmountable.”

The report put forward five recommendations, based on teacher focus groups and previous research: prioritize fair and equitable funding; improve state education data systems to increase transparency; provide greater support for school administrators; focus on making teaching an attractive and competitive career and increase access to high-quality professional development for teachers.

Thomas Morgan, spokesperson for the Michigan Education Association, emphasized the importance of incorporating teacher voice in the solutions.

“When you want to know what to do to fix our schools,” he said, “the first people you should talk to are people working on the front lines: those teachers working in our schools. They see things, they live it, they breathe it and they should be consulted.”

If I hired a tutor for my daughter, I’d be covering up the school’s and the teachers’ negligence. If I allowed my daughter to fail, however, I would be forcing her school and her teachers to face the consequences of their malpractice.

When I wrote about my position, it enraged many readers, with :

It’s always great to use your children as sacrificial lambs to make a political point than to do your best for them!

This woman is nuts, you work to give your kids what they need to succeed — period. Nothing will change with the school system whether the kid succeeds or fails.

You want to teach the Board of Education a lesson by letting your daughter failed (sic) her Spanish Regents Exam? You need your head examined.

And to that effect.

Except, now that the academic year is over, I can report that my approach worked. And that the outcome benefited not just my daughter, but her classmates and future students of the school.

In math class, my daughter and a group of friends first went to their guidance counselor with complaints about their teacher, and then to the principal, who sat in on one of their classes and promptly brought in a new instructor. Now that they had a teacher who, as my daughter said, “actually makes sense when he talks,” she went from getting 48%, 23% and 14% on tests to a final grade of 94. (And it wasn’t just her grades, which can be subjective. After all the drama, my daughter received an 85 on her math Regents exam. She actually learned.)

For Spanish 3, after five weeks of having no teacher at all in a class that would be culminating with another Regents exam, my daughter and her classmates complained to the Advanced Placement Spanish teacher, who invited them to attend her office hours for intense tutoring.

“She gave us a list of [vocabulary] words to memorize,” my daughter reported. “In the last five weeks of school, she taught us five different conjugations we didn’t know we needed. She made us try. It was horrible.”

My daughter finished 11th grade with a final grade of 80 in Spanish. And, much to our mutual shock, with an 83 on the Regents.

First and foremost, I must thank those teachers who went out of their way to help, even when it, technically, wasn’t their responsibility. As I have written about the inadequacies of some teachers, I feel compelled to shout it from the rooftops with gratitude for the ones who go above and beyond on a daily basis.

Secondly, kudos to the students at my daughter’s school who took their education into their own hands and demanded better instruction than what they were getting. They are an inspiration to those of us who sometimes lose faith that schools ever will, or ever could, improve.

And, finally, a plea to my fellow parents and guardians: Yes, I know it’s hard to watch your kids struggle. Yes, I know we all want to do what’s best for our children, give them a leg up, “give your kids what they need to succeed — period,” as one of my critics insisted.

But that’s a short-term solution for a much larger, institutional problem.

No school, whether in NYC or elsewhere in the nation, will ever fix its failures unless it is forced to confront them. And no school will ever be forced to confront them if families, desperate to protect their children’s grade-point average, continue picking up the slack, making the school appear to be doing an adequate job when it is, in fact, outsourcing its instruction to parents and private tutors while taking credit for positive results.

My daughter and her friends demanded that their school properly educate them and chalked up a victory not only for themselves, not only for their peers, but for all American students who now have a blueprint for taking similar action: In order to succeed, you first have to demonstrate where you’ve failed.

The publication of A Nation at Risk (ANAR) in 1983 was the defining moment of the “first wave” of education reform. It articulated improbably long-lived insights that continue to define education policy and discourse to this day. In particular, ANAR underscored, with uncommon rhetorical flourishes, the contrast between the ambitious ideals of a “Learning Society” and existing educational standards defined by modest minimum requirements, such as the low expectations embedded in high schools’ minimum competency tests and “cafeteria-style” curricula. Clearly, ANAR’s most prominent recommendation was the adoption of high school graduation requirements grounded in a “New Basics” curriculum that would feature four years of English; three years of science, math, and social studies; a half year of computer science; and, for college-bound students, two years of foreign language instruction.

However, ANAR also commented on several other dimensions of the education system in the United States, including the state of the teaching profession. In particular, ANAR concluded that “too many teachers are being drawn from the bottom quarter of graduating high school and college students.” The report also underscored the inadequate subject-matter focus of teacher training, low pay, teachers’ limited influence on key professional decisions (e.g., textbooks), and the targeted character of teacher shortages. These findings—and the seven specific recommendations ANAR made regarding teaching—have been the focus of education research, commentary, and policymaking to this day.

Below, I provide a compact overview of key insights from the research and policymaking that occurred in the wake of these recommendations. I focus specifically on the developments relevant to in service teachers, while the important issues related to recruitment, induction, and mentoring in the teaching profession are addressed separately by Michael Hansen in a previous analysis. ANAR made four specific recommendations relevant to in-service teachers. One is that teacher salaries should be “professionally competitive, market-sensitive, and performance-based” and linked to “an effective evaluation system” that rewards effective teachers and guides underperforming teachers toward improvement or termination. A related second recommendation advocates for collectively developed “career ladder” designations that distinguish beginning, experienced, and master teachers. ANAR’s remaining two recommendations for in-service teachers focus on supporting teacher improvement through funded time for professional development.

Theories of Action

ANAR’s recommendations for in-service teachers tacitly reflect two broad and complementary theories of action for improving teacher effectiveness and student outcomes. One involves improving the effectiveness of existing teachers. The intent is for this to occur through professional development activities and through the implementation of well-designed financial and professional incentives. Both of these intend to promote an understanding of high-quality classroom practices as well as their consistent use. The second theory of action focuses on selection—that is, performance assessment systems designed to retain and elevate the most effective teachers while ensuring that persistently ineffective teachers exit the classroom. Notably, these policy recommendations stand in sharp contrast to conventional efforts to promote teacher effectiveness through generic salary increases unrelated to performance or need and through reducing class sizes by hiring more teachers.

The motivations for ANAR’s theories of action rest upon several important stylized facts about teachers that have become increasingly well established since its publication. Arguably, the most foundational evidence concerns the variation in effectiveness across teachers. An older debate had questioned whether there are aspects specific to teaching that make it prohibitively difficult to measure teacher effectiveness in a valid and reliable manner. However, richer data and methodological advances have led to a consensus about the general validity of teacher effectiveness measures while also acknowledging important evidence on the degree of noisiness common to such measures.

These studies indicate that the variation in teacher effectiveness is large, particularly relative to the effects of other promising education interventions. Specifically, a one-standard deviation improvement in teacher effectiveness corresponds to a gain in student performance on standardized tests of roughly 0.1 to 0.2 standard deviations. Critically, the manner in which teachers are currently assessed — that is, informal, “drive-by” evaluations — captures virtually none of this documented variation, rates the vast majority of teachers as satisfactory, and results in little performance-based attrition of low-performing teachers from the classroom.

Another important stylized fact is that, at the hiring stage, school leaders have little capacity to identify the teachers who will become more effective. This combination of facts that teachers vary considerably in impact, but this impact can be observed much more easily after several years in the classroom than at the hiring stage—suggests the need for broader access to the teaching profession coupled with discerning assessment systems that guide subsequent personnel decisions. In particular, decisions to tenure rather than dismiss the lowest-performing teachers can have dramatic consequences given the length of teaching careers.

Over the past fifteen years, this evidence has motivated a number of ambitious public and philanthropic efforts to systematically improve the effectiveness of the teacher workforce through performance-based assessment systems. Recent research has also provided more credible evidence of direct initiatives designed to improve the performance of all in-service teachers through professional development. I discuss these policy innovations and the related research below.

Improving teacher effectiveness

ANAR recommended that teachers receive eleven-month contracts so that they could spend more time in professional development and provide additional instruction for students with special needs. While the eleven-month contract has not been widely adopted, broader efforts to improve the performance of in-service teachers through direct training and support involve a substantial expenditure of time and money. However, accurately identifying the magnitude of these outlays is not straightforward given the accounting challenges of categorizing such activities and their demands on time for both teachers and nonteaching staff. For example, a 2019 study by Alexander and Jang examined expenditure reports for Minnesota school districts and found that 1 percent of 2013–14 operational expenditures was spent on activities defined by the state as staff development. In contrast, a 2015 study by the New Teacher Project found that 2013–14 expenses related to teacher improvement constituted, on average, 8 percent of district budgets. This figure consisted of both direct expenditures on teacher improvement, such as professional development, coaching, and new-teacher support, as well as related indirect expenditures, such as the management, strategic, and operational expenses for these improvement efforts.

Focusing specifically on professional development, a 2014 study commissioned by the Gates Foundation found that the typical teacher spends sixty-eight hours per year on professional learning directed by districts, or eighty-nine hours when courses and self-guided professional learning are included. Most of the time spent by teachers in professional development occurs in workshops and professional learning communities conducted by district staff. The cost of this professional development was estimated at $18 billion per year in 2014. Teacher perceptions of the quality of these investments have generally not been encouraging, nor do they appear to have clear links to teacher performance or improvement. The Gates report also stresses the overwhelming use of district staff instead of market-tested external providers to provide professional development, as well as limited teacher voice in choosing their training.

Despite the considerable expense and prominence of teacher professional development, credible research on the impact of these investments has also been quite limited over much of the period since ANAR’s publication. For example, Yoon et al. reviewed more than 1,300 studies potentially addressing the impact of teacher professional development on student learning and found only nine studies that met the evidence standards in the federal What Works Clearinghouse: six randomized controlled trials and three quasi-experimental studies conducted between 1986 and 2003. However, what these studies revealed suggests a striking proof of concept: teachers who received substantial professional development could boost the achievement of the average control-group student by 21 percentile points. Notably, these nine professional development initiatives focused on elementary grades but differed in their theories of action.

However, other quasi-experimental studies serve as a reminder that implementing effective professional development consistently at scale is a serious challenge. Jacob and Lefgren examined the effect of teacher training in Chicago Public Schools using a credible natural experiment in which schools with low baseline test scores received additional resources for staff development. They found that this initiative had “no statistically or academically significant effect” on math or reading achievement of elementary students. Similarly, Harris and Sass examined student-level longitudinal data linked to teacher data for the state of Florida and did not find an overall impact of professional development on teacher productivity. However, they did find positive effects of content-focused math professional development on student outcomes at the elementary and middle-school levels.

Over the past decade, experimental studies of teacher professional development have proliferated. In general, they have provided mixed evidence of the learning impact of investments in professional development. For example, experimental studies by Garet et al. found that reading- and math-focused training changed teacher knowledge and practice but without clearly improving student achievement. However, meta-analytic summaries of such experimental professional development evaluations suggest that positive effects exist but vary considerably by program design. For example, Basma and Savage examined seventeen literacy-focused professional development studies and found an overall effect size for reading achievement of 0.225. Similarly, in a meta-analysis of ninety-five STEM-focused professional development studies with experimental and quasi-experimental designs, Lynch et al. report an average effect size of 0.21.

However, other multisubject meta-analyses suggest smaller but still positive effects on student learning. For example, Fletcher-Wood and Zuccollo identified fifty-three experimental evaluations of teacher professional development and found an overall effect size of 0.09. Similarly, Sims et al. reviewed 104 experimental evaluations and found an overall effect size of 0.05. Given the considerable financial expense of most training investments, effects of this size, though positive, raise serious questions about cost-effectiveness.

These reviews also note and seek to examine the considerable variation across professional development programs in terms of impact. Kennedy argues that the widely discussed design features of teacher professional development — namely program duration, emphasis on content knowledge, and use of professional learning communities — are far less relevant than whether the training addresses any of the four persistent challenges of teaching: portraying content, managing student behavior, enlisting student participation, and knowing what students understand. In a similar vein, Sims et al. characterize professional development programs by the more general ways they change teacher skills and behaviors. Specifically, they characterize teacher professional development by four “IGTP” traits that indicate whether teachers are provided with new insights (I), goal-oriented behaviors (G), and techniques (T) that are embedded in practice (P). And they conclude that professional development programs with all four traits have an effect size on student learning of 0.17. However, these assessments may obscure the relevance of professional development initiatives that focus on the most effective elements of content and practice, such as an emphasis on “science of reading” approaches in literacy-focused training.

Overall, this evidence indicates that ANAR was prescient in emphasizing the need for ongoing training of in-service teachers. The available evidence suggests that such training can have substantial effects on student learning. However, realizing the increasingly well-established potential of this training is not straightforward. It involves the perennial challenge of translating research findings—that is, the critical design features of effective professional development— into genuine changes in high-impact practice at scale.

Teacher evaluation and performance-based incentives

ANAR also made prominent recommendations to dramatically change how we pay and evaluate public school teachers. In general, the status quo to this day compensates teachers according to single-salary schedules that rigidly structure pay according to years of experience and observed qualifications (e.g., a graduate degree) that do not consistently predict teacher effectiveness. This approach has historical origins in well-intentioned efforts to eliminate overt discrimination and capriciousness in teacher pay. Today, critics allege that this inflexible approach has led to low and undifferentiated salaries that do little to attract, motivate, and retain the most-effective teachers and to direct the least-effective teachers out of the classroom, particularly in hard-to-staff schools and high-need subjects. Furthermore, this approach to pay is coupled with low-stakes, “drive-by” teacher evaluations that capture little of the variation in teacher performance and do not provide reliable guidance for professional learning.

ANAR envisioned an alternative in which teacher compensation was substantially higher but also based on performance in a manner that would direct persistently underperforming teachers either to improve or to leave the profession. In the aftermath of ANAR’s publication, several states and districts experimented with providing teachers with extra pay and career-ladder recognitions for demonstrated merit (though, not generally, dismissing chronically underperforming teachers). These reforms tended to be short-lived despite encouraging results. While the rollback of these reforms was clearly a policy choice, the underlying causes are debated. Ballou argued that it largely reflected the opposition of teachers’ unions. Murnane and Cohen contended that it reflected the distinctive character of teachers’ professional practice — that is, multidimensional and difficult to observe. However, random-assignment evidence from a comparatively well-implemented career ladder program in Tennessee indicates that it was effective in identifying teachers who raised student achievement.

The past two decades have witnessed a diverse variety of ambitious efforts, often encouraged by prominent philanthropic and federal initiatives, to measure teacher performance and to link it to improvement supports and incentives such as financial benefits, career-ladder designations, and dismissal threats. The research on these different reforms suggests their promise but also underscores the nontrivial challenges (e.g., design features, implementation, and political credibility) that make the consistent realization of this promise difficult. For example, the Obama administration’s Race to the Top (RttT) initiative disbursed more than $5 billion to states in a competition based in part on their commitment to developing systems for promoting teacher effectiveness. While RttT was effective in promoting state policy adoption, its effects on key design features and implementation are far less clear. In particular, while states were more likely to have multiple measures of teacher performance in the wake of RttT, the use of this data to inform salary and retention decisions remained uncommon. The state reforms over this period were “rarely sustained over time,” offered low bonuses, and rated fewer than 1 percent of teachers as unsatisfactory.

A more granular focus on the available evidence from specific initiatives provides richer insights into these issues of design, implementation, and political durability. For example, several studies focused narrowly on simply providing teachers with incentives for improved performance. These studies often found null (or weak) effects that are likely to reflect the unique character of these programs. “Cash for test scores” experiments with individual incentives for teachers in Nashville and group incentives for teachers in Round Rock, Texas, found little to no evidence of effects on teacher practices, attitudes, and the learning gains of their students. Similarly, studies of a group-based teacherincentive experiment in New York City found that they had no overall effects on key teacher or student outcomes.

Critics of teacher incentives suggest that these null findings reflect a misunderstanding of teacher motivations and the manner in which such incentives might debase intrinsic motivation. However, three design features of these studies could also contribute to these null findings and have important implications for performance-based assessment and compensation. First, the fact that participants know that these experimental incentives have a short term (e.g., two years) can sharply attenuate the resulting motivation to undertake changes in professional practices. This same concern can also apply to the incentives embedded in at-scale policy reforms that are viewed as faddish and unlikely to endure politically. Second, these initiatives generally focused on student achievement as the incentivized outcome. This may weaken the impact of incentives if teachers do not see or understand how they should change everyday practice to realize these rewards. A related third point is that these incentive studies generally did little to support and guide teachers in how they could change their professional practices to earn these rewards.

Three other studies suggest the potential importance of other design features. A teacherincentive study in Chicago Heights, Illinois, found positive effects on student achievement (but only in the first wave of the experiment) when the incentives were framed as the loss of an award rather than a gain. Second, the Talent Transfer Initiative (TTI) found positive effects when offering high-performing teachers a high-powered incentive ($20,000) linked to a distinctly clear, easily observed, and important behavior: working in a hard-to-staff school for two years. However, it is notable that these incentive-based gains were difficult to realize. More than 1,500 teachers had to be approached in order to fill only eighty-one vacancies. Third, the Accelerating Campus Excellence (ACE) program in Dallas similarly provided large incentives to highly effective teachers willing to work in hard-to-staff schools. Morgan et al. presented evidence that ACE produced dramatic gains in student performance: a 0.3 effect size in reading and 0.4 in math. This study also found that this success replicated as the program went to scale and that these gains were reversed when the program was eliminated.

Notably, these focused incentive programs all fall short of the more comprehensive system of assessments, supports, and incentives recommended by ANAR. TAP: The System for Teacher and Student Advancement (formerly known as the Teacher Advancement Program), which was introduced in 1999 and is currently active in “nearly twenty states and hundreds of school districts across the US,” is closer to ANAR’s vision. Specifically, the defining features of TAP include career ladder designations for teachers and job-embedded, professional learning led by master teachers. In support of this professional learning, TAP also provides teachers with comprehensive evaluations of their professional practice. However, it is not clear that this “instructionally focused accountability” articulates clear mechanisms for directing consistently low-performing teachers out of the classroom (the selection mechanism in ANAR’s theory of change). Finally, TAP includes performance pay typically linked to observations of teachers’ professional practice, such as classroom observation, portfolios, and interviews, as well as test scores.

The available evidence suggests that TAP is effective in improving teacher performance and student outcomes. Specifically, in a quasi-experimental study based on 1,200 schools from two states, Springer, Ballou, and Peng found that TAP increased student performance, particularly at the elementary school level, with effect sizes varying from 0.12 to 0.34 by grade. Similarly, Cohodes, Eren, and Ozturk, leveraging the rollout of TAP across schools in South Carolina, found that it generated improvements in several long-run outcomes, including educational attainment, criminal activity, and the take-up of government assistance. However, a random-assignment evaluation of TAP in Chicago schools by Glazerman and Seifullah found that it did not improve student achievement and that it was also vexed by the challenges of implementing this reform with fidelity, such as teacher payouts being smaller than originally stated and no rewards based on value added because of inadequate data systems.

Two other high-profile studies provided further evidence of the serious challenges of implementing comprehensive reforms of teacher assessments and compensation as well as of credibly assessing their effects. The first example is the federal Teacher Incentive Fund (TIF). Congress established TIF in 2006 to provide grants to high-need schools implementing performance-based compensation systems. The four required components of TIF reforms also resembled those suggested by ANAR: (1) measures of teacher performance, including observations of classroom practice; (2) large, differentiated, difficult-to earn performance bonuses; (3) additional pay for career-ladder opportunities, such as becoming a master teacher and coach; and (4) professional development linked to the teacher assessments. A congressionally mandated study of TIF focused on the 2010 grant recipients in more than 130 school districts and found it led to student achievement of 1 to 2 percentile points higher in reading and math.

However, there are two important caveats to this evidence of modest impact. First, the implementation of these reforms in the study districts was incomplete. Only about half of the participating districts reported implementing all four components of the reforms required by TIF. In particular, professional development was frequently not provided, and most teachers received bonuses, “a finding inconsistent with making bonuses challenging to earn.” Second, the treatment–control contrast assessed in this random assignment study did not examine the effect of TIF versus “business as usual.” Instead, the treatment schools in the study were intended to receive pay-for-performance bonuses while the control group received automatic bonuses. And all study participants, both treatment and control, were assigned access to the three other TIF components: career ladder responsibilities and rewards, evaluative feedback, and professional development. In this critical but often overlooked detail, the federal study of TIF more closely resembles the studies of teacher incentives noted above than a true evaluation of teacher assessment systems.

The Gates-funded Intensive Partnerships for Effective Teaching initiative is a second widely discussed example of implementing and evaluating teacher assessment systems. This initiative sought to introduce assessment reforms within three school districts and four charter management organizations. Similar to both TAP and TIF, this effort featured focused professional development and career ladder incentives along with performance pay and retention decisions based on direct, structured observation of teacher practice and value-added scores. A quasi-experimental study found that these reforms did not clearly improve the focal student outcomes of high school graduation and college attendance. However, the implementation of the reforms appears to have been weak. The teacher evaluations flagged few teachers as poor performers, and in sites with available data, only 1 percent were dismissed for poor performance. As with the federal TIF evaluation, the treatment contrast that was studied was muted because the comparison schools in this study often adopted similar policies.

IMPACT, the highly controversial teacher assessment reforms introduced in the District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS), is distinctive as a seminal and enduring effort to implement ANAR’s recommendations with fidelity. IMPACT evaluated DCPS teachers on multiple measures with a heavy emphasis on structured classroom observations, including some conducted by district staff, and linked professional development. These evaluations resulted in measures of teacher performance that exhibited variation rather than being largely uniform. IMPACT linked these measures to high-stakes consequences: substantial pay increases for “highly effective” teachers, particularly those in high-poverty schools; dismissal for a small number of “ineffective” teachers; and a dismissal threat for “minimally effective” teachers who did not become effective within a year.

A quasi-experimental study of the incentive contrasts embedded in IMPACT found it had positive effects on teacher performance. This study’s design leveraged a feature of IMPACT in which teachers with performance scores just below a threshold value were deemed “minimally effective” and subject to a dismissal threat while those with scores at or above the threshold were not. A comparison of teachers just below and above this threshold found that the threat of dismissal caused minimally effective teachers either to leave the district or to improve their measured performance substantially. A powerful financial incentive for highly effective teachers to repeat their prior performance also appeared to have positive effects.

Three other aspects of IMPACT merit emphasis. First, the political credibility and resiliency of IMPACT appeared to be highly salient. In 2010, when the city (and district) leadership who championed IMPACT were forced out of office, the first “minimally effective” designations did not appear to change teacher behavior. However, the ratings reported in the summer of 2011, when it appeared that IMPACT would endure, did drive changes in teacher behavior.

Second, evidence indicates that IMPACT not only improved the performance of existing teachers but also replaced underperforming teachers who exited with substantially more effective instructors. Specifically, a quasi-experimental study by Adnot et al. finds that, when a low-performing teacher exited, their replacement raised student performance by 0.14 standard deviations in reading and 0.24 standard deviations in math. Third, the performance benefits of IMPACT’s incentives endured through subsequent revisions to the teacher supports and ratings structure.

A second district reform of note (and one with strong parallels to IMPACT) began in the Dallas Independent School District in 2015. Specifically, like IMPACT, the Teacher Excellence Initiative (TEI) replaced a single-salary schedule with compensation based on multiple measures of teacher performance. Furthermore, like IMPACT, it also did so in the context of accountability for school principals. TEI also implemented a unique design feature to discourage inflated or arbitrary ratings of teachers. It fixed the overall distribution of ratings and penalized principals for subjective ratings that were highly misaligned with test-based ratings. A synthetic-control study by Hanushek et al. found that these reforms led to statistically significant increases in student achievement that grew over time to a roughly 0.2 standard deviation in math and a 0.1 standard deviation in reading.

Concluding thoughts

ANAR’s recommendations that focused on improving the effectiveness of in-service teachers were a harbinger of some of the most dramatic education policy innovations of the past forty years. And these innovations have provided us with several proofs of concept and new insights that establish the potential to improve student learning through dramatic changes in teacher evaluation, in-service training, and compensation.

However, it must also be acknowledged that there has clearly not been large-scale, lasting change regarding ANAR’s teacher-focused recommendations. Uninformative, low-stakes assessments of professional practice and rigid single-salary schedules are still the norm for the vast majority of teachers in US public schools. And while in-service teachers do engage in extensive professional development, the impact of these expensive and highly variable investments is uncertain at best.

Any serious effort to reimagine the assessment, training, and compensation of in-service teachers should begin by confronting the factors that have contributed to the long durability of the status quo. There appear to be three broad and interrelated impediments to substantive change. The first is the need to improve the knowledge base of how best to design the key features of these reforms. For example, efforts to improve teacher evaluation and introduce performance-based teacher pay rely critically on valid and reliable measures of teacher performance. Promising gains in measuring teacher effectiveness are likely to come from continued improvements to structured rubrics for classroom practices. Incentives can better guide the professional improvement of teachers when they are linked to the high-impact, everyday classroom practices teachers directly control and can enhance through complementary training.

Another important area where improved knowledge is critical to driving at-scale change concerns the design of teacher professional development. The typical professional development experience, workshops directed by internal district staff, is often criticized (e.g., the New Teacher Project 2015). At the same time, a recent and growing body of experimental studies indicates that purposively designed professional development can have substantial impact. This literature generally emphasizes the particular benefits of in-service training that focuses on meeting more general challenges of teacher practice. While more can be learned about the design of professional development, the question of how to design its delivery is even more uncertain. A study from the Gates Foundation suggests that relying more on external providers of professional development will make it easier to move nimbly to market-tested and effective approaches. However, several of the teacher assessment reforms discussed here instead emphasize redesigning internally provided professional development to rely on master teachers who may be better positioned to serve as coaches providing embedded and relevant training. These issues underscore the need to build a complementary learning agenda around any new reforms (e.g., inquiry cycles, networked improvement communities).

A second impediment to realizing ANAR’s vision concerns the multifaceted operational challenges of implementing meaningful reforms effectively at scale. The null findings from credibly identified studies of professional development in at-scale field settings suggest this issue. However, more-direct and sobering evidence comes from several well-funded, high-profile efforts to introduce teacher assessment and compensation reforms at some scale. These include (1) the failure to deliver value-added bonuses because of data-system inadequacies in TAP; (2) the limited variation in teacher ratings and their infrequent use in personnel decisions in the Gates Foundation’s Intensive Partnership for Effective Teaching; (3) the inconsistent delivery of professional development and the broad distribution of bonuses under the federal Teaching Incentive Fund; and (4) the limited use of teacher evaluations to guide salary and retention decisions under the RttT initiative.

A third and closely related impediment is political opposition. With regard to introducing performance-based pay, this most obviously refers to the opposition of teachers’ unions. However, it can also involve unresponsive public-sector bureaucracies. Furthermore, reform efforts can also fail when their success and durability rely on politically determined funding commitments. The political opposition to reform in the broader public also turns on misinformation about what the existing evidence discussed here actually indicates. Specifically, opponents of the types of reforms recommended by ANAR often argue that investments in professional development are effective while performance-based pay has failed.

Given these interlocking issues, a compelling way to achieve change at scale may involve forming political coalitions around compelling reforms that adopt some but not all of ANAR’s proposals. For example, it may be possible to move school districts toward more effective professional development delivered by a carefully curated set of outside vendors if their provision involved cost-sharing that saved district resources. Alternatively, it may be possible to achieve durable political support for a teacher evaluation system if that system focuses narrowly on identifying master teachers and providing them with training and extra pay to coach their peers but takes a more incremental approach toward dismissing underperforming teachers. Intentionally combining such efforts with careful evaluation could, over the longer term, seed further evidence-based change in this important domain.

See the full Hoover Institution initiative: . 

In 1983, a special commission organized by the U.S. Department of Education released , an unapologetic critique of America’s public schools. Its publication prompted both a firestorm of public response and a seismic shift of policy and practice reforms at every level of the education system, permanently altering the policy landscape that has shaped today’s public schools. 

The report directed many pointed barbs at the teacher workforce and those tasked with preparing them. It concluded that both the quality of current teachers and the quantity of available talent to fill teaching roles in schools were sorely deficient; both dimensions needed immediate intervention to achieve educational excellence. What the report failed to do, however, was reconcile the inherent tensions in simultaneously pursuing both higher quality and quantity, or offer a strategy to systematically develop the teacher workforce that was desired. 

Consequently, as A Nation at Risk unleashed a wave of education reform, the initiatives focused on teachers were both expansive and incoherent. In my essay, “,” recently published in the Hoover Institution’s series (edited by Stephen L. Bowen and Margaret E. Raymond), I recount the divergent approaches to reforming the teacher workforce that developed over time. 

This post highlights some of the lessons learned from looking back at the 40 years of reform and research on the teacher pipeline since the report’s publication.

Teachers: Part of both the problem and the solution

In the late 1970s and early 1980s leading up to the report’s publication, the public seemed to be losing confidence in the nation’s public schools. , , and desegregation efforts were widely perceived as .

The teacher workforce was also viewed as a depreciating asset. The professional workforce was opening for educated young women, and as a career. The starting in the late 1960s, and public sentiment turned decidedly anti-union under the Reagan administration, with unions often perceived as stymying public schools’ ability to serve students. 

It was into this downtrodden atmosphere that A Nation at Risk’s scathing critiques were published. Yet instead of arguing for divestment from public schools, the report offered a laundry list of recommendations to promote comprehensive reform. Policy recommendations regarding teachers, and the pipeline leading to the classroom featured prominently in this list, including compensation reform, student grants or loans for those who commit to becoming teachers, and alternative certification.

The report’s authors clearly felt that the teacher workforce had problems with both the quality of the workforce and the quantity of people signing up for the profession, and both needed to be remediated. However, the report failed to acknowledge that quality and quantity are inherently in conflict—for example, as far as the teacher pipeline is concerned, prioritizing quality will limit the quantity of people who can meet the higher expectations. 

Improving the teacher pipeline on either dimension would have been challenge enough, but to address both teacher quality and quantity simultaneously would be a Herculean feat.

Two approaches to reform teaching, frequently in conflict

Some teacher policy actions started immediately in the wake of the report—for example, four states had by the following year. Other initiatives incubated for a bit before reaching maturation, including the establishment of the (NBPTS) in 1987.

Looking back at the various approaches to shoring up the teacher pipeline, I categorize these policy actions into two types. Actions that seek to shore up weak points in the teacher workforce and recruit more into the profession I call “outside-in” reforms, as they see the primary challenge of teaching as a failure to attract and retain the best talent (think of alternative certification or loan forgiveness policies). Another approach sees the failure to support and develop talent within the workforce as the primary challenge. I call these “inside-out” initiatives (think of NBPTS or career ladders). 

These two approaches are not inherently in conflict, but they take different stances on the relative importance of teacher quality versus quantity. The “outside-in” approaches lean heavily on teacher quantity first (through recruiting to high-need settings, say) and then assume policies will follow that enable school systems to be more selective to ensure teacher quality. The “inside-out” approach reverses that prioritization, focusing on developing quality within the workforce first (through demonstrating mastery through NBPTS certification, for example) and assuming that elevated role will attract new supplies of teacher candidates. 

With limitations on both funding and public attention, these two approaches often find themselves in conflict within the education policy space. Moreover, these diverging approaches have attracted different sets of advocates and public champions over time (for example, think of philanthropic megadonors often representing the “outside-in” approach and teacher unions as representing the “inside-out” approach). These groups frequently engage in conflict over teachers’ role (or blame) for past failures and offer contrasting views towards school improvement. Conflicts like these are at the heart of why teaching has earned the ignominious label of “.”&�Բ�����;

Strategically deploying different strategies, based on school context

Despite these conflicts, both policy approaches offer good ideas that have been borne out in the evidence, though they also come with limitations. And neither set offers enough to ensure a sufficient supply of effective teachers accessible for all students, a . If only we could deploy these policies in complementary ways, then we can make headway on some of the real staffing challenges facing schools. 

What this looks like in practice is that we develop a systematic plan about workforce management that is sensitive to workforce needs on the ground. The most important context here—the one conspicuously omitted from A Nation at Risk—is school settings that serve high-need student populations. We must recognize that these schools have a unique difficulty attracting and retaining quality teachers. Consequently, these schools spend disproportionate amounts of money and time recruiting, interviewing, and onboarding new teachers. Even if they could invest in building teacher quality, the high levels of turnover lower the expected return on that investment. In other words, these schools have a problem with teacher quantity first.

I propose that policymakers and school leaders prioritize efforts that build and sustain teacher quantity in these settings; in other words, the “outside-in” options are those most readily applicable. For example, monetary bonuses for teachers or generous service scholarships conditioned on working in high-need settings would be an excellent way to shore up the workforce. This does not mean that we ignore quality in these schools entirely, but we should only look to building quality once policies prioritizing a robust supply of qualified teachers are firmly in place, avoiding the unfortunate (but too common) scenario in which disadvantaged schools are seen as mere training grounds for novices before moving to greener pastures. Thus, the quality-developing “inside-out” reforms come second.

Outside of these high-need settings, where teacher supply is not nearly such a pressing need, these schools should emphasize building teacher quality first. Thus, the “inside-out” options come to the foreground. Further, as they develop and sustain these approaches, they can in turn offer a supply of high-quality teachers to support higher-need settings.

The state of the teacher pipeline continues to challenge schools

The state of public schools now is, on the surface, very different from that in 1983. We have just recently witnessed schools shutting down for months on end to limit the spread of COVID. Schools have also become new battlegrounds in culture wars. 

These developments have impacted the teacher workforce. First, teachers became frontline workers aiding children’s learning recovery, and increased burnout and elevated turnover in the wake of the pandemic. Second, the culture wars appear to have had on teachers. These challenges are layered on top of a teacher pipeline that was already weakened before the pandemic hit, prompting some experts to warn of a “” forming in the teacher labor market. 

The pipeline into teaching is objectively worse than any point in recent memory, with nearly of teacher training programs in 2020-21, a decline of over 40% from the (284,000 completers). These teacher graduates are now serving a student body that is more than than it was in 1970. The growing cost of college is also a widely perceived barrier for entry into profession, especially for who are have fewer financial resources and are more burdened by debts to get through school. Yet, are on the decline, offering little hope for a resurgent teacher pipeline. 

Under the surface, though, I also observe parallels between then and now. In 1983, like today, student achievement was tapering off after a period of high growth, and there was growing dissatisfaction with the . Also, student enrollments were dropping, as some families began opting for non-public school options. It was clear then, as it seems now, that our public schools are far from returning to that level of performance in our recent past.

Another fascinating parallel comes from a 2022 study by . Looking at historical trends in teacher prestige, interest in the profession, teacher preparation, and teacher satisfaction, the authors conclude that the teacher workforce is now near or at historic lows. In fact, the last time we were in this position was in the early 1980s, right before A Nation at Risk. Afterwards, there was a quick upsurge in public support for and interest in the teaching profession, though the authors could not pinpoint exactly what the catalyst was back then. Perhaps part of this turnaround was new messaging about the nobility of the teaching profession (championed by those reforming from the “inside out”). Perhaps part of the new interest in teaching was due to easier access into the profession and visible pay reform efforts (thanks to the “outside-in” reformers). 

Regardless of the source, what it suggests to me is that a much-improved prognosis for the teacher workforce and pipeline may not be far around the corner. We don’t need to think of new solutions. We just need to deploy the ones we have with more strategy and purpose.

����Ӱ�� is partnering with Stanford University’s Hoover Institution to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the ‘A Nation At Risk’ report. Hoover’s spotlights insights and analysis from experts, educators and policymakers as to what evidence shows about the broader impact of 40 years of education reform and how America’s school system has (and hasn’t) changed since the groundbreaking 1983 report. (See our full series)

According to the , 29 states and the District of Columbia used weak tests, giving false assurance to nearly 100,000 educators nationwide.

The study’s findings were released as roughly don’t meet reading expectations by fourth grade — with an even bleaker reality for historically marginalized students, the study said.

“Every child deserves great reading instruction, but far too many children aren’t receiving it,” NCTQ president Heather Peske said in a statement. “This lack of preparation has a profound impact on students’ literacy skills and future prospects.”

NCTQ reported 56% of Black students, 50% of Latino students, 52% of students in poverty, 70% of students with disabilities and 67% of English learners don’t meet reading standards, according to the .

The think tank determined whether states used strong, acceptable or weak elementary reading licensing tests based on how much each addresses the core components of scientifically based reading instruction.

The core components include phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension.

Of the 25 different tests that states used, the think tank identified 15 as weak — with only four considered acceptable and six considered strong.

In total, 18 states used strong tests — including California, Texas, Connecticut, Colorado, Ohio and Virginia — and 28 states used weak tests — including Florida, Nevada, New York, New Jersey, Illinois and Hawaii.

Iowa in particular stood out for not requiring a test at all — suggesting teachers in the state would not be well-versed in how to teach reading, the study found.

Strong tests use at least 75% of the core components, in addition to addressing struggling readers and English learners.

Acceptable tests use at least half and weak tests use less than half of the core components identified.

Weak tests include the “Praxis Elementary Education: Multiple Subjects (5001)” test used in 16 states and the “Praxis Elementary Education: Content Knowledge for Teaching (7811)” test used in seven states.

“Teachers who aren’t prepared in the most effective instructional practices for teaching reading unknowingly enter classrooms ill-prepared to help students become successful readers,” Peske said. “States can help ensure teachers are prepared to teach reading effectively by requiring stronger licensure tests.”

The stubborn fact is that voters’ opinions and governors’ statements show broad agreement on a collection of practical education issues that offers a common-sense K-12 governing agenda, according to three recent analyses.

The two issues where there is agreement are expanding career and technical education (CTE) and increasing school funding. Others include child care and early learning, teacher pay and families and students with more education options.

The first analysis is from a 2022 of 1,200 midterm voters, plus another 600 from the battleground states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. It identifies four issues on which voters agree.

Voters overall want more parental control and endorse specific changes. Over 2 in 3 (64%) believe “parents should have more control … right now” over what public schools teach. Republicans (93%), Independents (70%) and parents (70%) agree, though more than 2 in 3 (64%) Democrats disagree.

More than 3 in 4 voters overall, across parties — including in battleground states — say four issues from a list of 12 are “very important”: ensuring every child is on track (86%); hiring and retaining high-quality teachers (81%); offering more career education and real-world learning (75%); and improving school security and safety (74%).

A slim majority (53%) supports increasing existing school budgets if funds follow students to “where they receive their education,” though nearly 7 in 10 (68%) Democrats oppose this approach.

Almost 7 in 10 (69%) voters overall, including a majority (51%) of Democrats, support creating more education options, including charter schools, private schools and homeschooling. 

A second , by the Manhattan Institute’s Andy Smarick, examines the K-12 agendas of 2022 gubernatorial candidates. At least 25% of the candidates agreed on 6 out of 27 issues, with two tied for first place: expanding CTE programs and increasing school funding, both endorsed by 30 of the 72 candidates, or 42%. The other four top issues were school choice (24 candidates; 33%); expanded pre-K (22 candidates; 31%); teacher pay raises (19 candidates; 26%); and curricular reforms (19 candidates; 26%).

Finally, an issue by the Education Commission of the States of 2023 State of the State addresses found that CTE, teaching quality and school finance “among the most popular” K-12 issues the governors mentioned. A majority also voiced support for early learning and child care. Other “hot topics this year” included student health, school choice and safety. ​​An analysis by the reached similar conclusions.

This agreement creates an ideological heartland, a coined by the American Enterprise Institute’s Ryan Streeter to describe not a physical location, but a state of mind where domestic realists live.

Domestic realists are not given to ideological political extremes. They lean left or right or are part of that group called moderates. Roughly two-thirds of Americans live in this ideological heartland, compared with less than a quarter of staunch progressives or conservatives who live at the edges of the political spectrum, immersed in the culture wars.

With Republicans in 22 states and Democrats in 17 states controlling the governorship and both houses of the state legislature — the of single-party government — legislative specifics will vary based on party affiliation and voter preferences. This gives policy and civic entrepreneurs the freedom to meet state needs and local circumstances.

For example, more school funding in one state may mean increasing pay for teachers. In another state, it may mean starting new or expanding current child care and early learning programs. A third state may create education savings accounts that parents can use for private school tuition or to purchase tutoring for a child in traditional district public schools.

Or, a state may use more funding for several purposes, as is being suggested in . There, a new legislative proposal would give private-school parents up to $5,000 in annual credits and homeschool parents up to $2,500 for tuition, tutoring and curriculum, while also providing $500 million in additional grants, salary increases and other funding for traditional public schools.

This implementation pluralism follows the American federalist tradition. It allows states and local communities to be laboratories of democracy that test and refine laws and policies over time. In the of former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, “a single courageous state may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory, and try novel societal and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country.”

It’s time to forge a new K-12 political coalition of domestic realists from the ideological heartland who have a practical set of governing ideas based on everyday concerns shared by most Americans.

Disclosure: Walton Family Foundation provides financial support to ����Ӱ��.

is one of the first thorough examinations of classroom observation — the common method of using an evaluator, such as a school principal, to watch and rate a teacher’s work with pupils — across an entire state. Its findings may cast doubt on the efficacy and fairness of the practice not only in Tennessee, but also the huge number of states that also place the in-person reviews at the heart of their federally mandated teacher evaluation systems.

Study co-author Jason Grissom, a professor of public policy at Vanderbilt University, said that distortions in teacher evaluations — which were especially large in observations of male instructors relative to females — held significant sway over decisions on retention, firing, and promotion. Biased scores could undermine states’ ability to raise teacher performance and offer a better education to students, he added. 

“If we’re not collecting accurate information, it’s going to disrupt the feedback that’s supposed to be a big way that evaluation can drive improvement,” Grissom said. “And it can treat people unfairly, which can undermine the capacity of the system to improve schools.”

The study, conducted by Grissom and University of Virginia professor Brendan Bartanen, focused on Tennessee as an example of an evaluation framework that has long since reached maturity, with standards-based performance rubrics and observers who are trained to follow specific procedures in rating teachers. One of the original winners of the Obama administration’s Race to the Top school reform initiative, the state first rolled out its system in 2011. In-person appraisals represent the largest single element in each teacher’s overall performance score, alongside student test scores and other factors. 

To isolate the possible role of bias in ratings, the researchers accessed detailed administrative data on Tennessee teacher demographics, locations, and work experience. Next, they poured over information from over 460,000 classroom observations between the 2011–12 and 2018–19 school years. Teachers in the state typically undergo between two and five observations each year, and the overwhelming majority are rated on 19 indicators of instruction, environment, and planning. On each metric, subjects are measured on a scale of one (“significantly below expectations”) to five (“significantly above expectations”). 

Across all years, male teachers scored approximately .18 points lower than females on average on the 1–5 scale, while African Americans scored approximately .09 points lower than whites. Black male teachers, faced with two possible sources of bias, were the lowest-scoring group, rated about half of a standard deviation lower than their white female counterparts, the highest-scoring. Black women scored slightly higher than white men. While ratings for all groups crept upward over time, gaps between categories remained roughly the same throughout.

The racial and gender disparities shrank somewhat, but did not disappear, when Grissom and Bartanen controlled for factors such as teacher experience, educational attainment (whether or not they had gained a master’s or PhD), and student test performance. In other words, even when comparing similarly credentialed teachers whose pupils achieved at about the same level, white and female teachers were rated higher.

As a way of demonstrating the effects of these gaps, the researchers theoretically “credited” African American and male teachers with the points that they evidently lost due to bias during their classroom observations; ultimately, 9 percent of all male teachers would have ascended to the next threshold on the five-point measurement scale, including one-third of all males rated at Level One and nearly one-quarter of males rated at Level Two. 

The difference in those grades, especially at the lower margins of teacher performance, could mean everything to a given educator, Grissom argued.

“The difference between a Level-One and a Level-Two [grade] is very likely the difference between you getting to come back to your school next year or not,” he said. “The difference between Level Two and Level Three might be the difference between you being on probationary or non-probationary status. So the magnitude is large in that sense.”

Exploring possible explanations for the trends, the authors discovered that the racial gap, while smaller, was perhaps more explicable: Black teachers were more likely than white teachers in their own schools to be assigned students who had previously achieved at lower levels and were more likely to be absent from school. They also received modestly higher grades from same-race observers than from white observers, and experienced larger score gaps in schools that employed fewer African American teachers. 

The explanation for the difference between genders was murkier, though it could stem from the fact that men are more likely to teach subjects (such as career and technical education) and at grade levels (particularly high school) that tend to see lower classroom observation scores on average.

The results somewhat echo those of earlier research focusing on the Measures of Effective Teaching Project, a teacher evaluation initiative funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. , two groups of teachers were more likely to be graded lower on a set of low-stakes classroom observations: Men, and those who worked in classrooms with higher concentrations of low-performing students and students of color. A authored by researchers at Brown University also found that low-achieving students are disproportionately likely to be assigned to non-white and novice teachers.

Grissom added that his own prior investigations have suggested that school leaders rely heavily on classroom observations as a kind of “eye test” to help form judgments on personnel decisions. 

“One of the really stark findings is that principals really emphasize what they’re seeing in observation,” he said. “That’s the real information that’s useful, and in their own minds, they down-weight other information for various reasons.”

Across the country each year, thousands of teaching candidates get ready to begin their classroom careers. They finish up their graduate coursework, start scanning excitedly for job openings — and then fail their states’ teacher licensure exams. Dejected and daunted by the prospect of retaking the test, many never become teachers.

It’s a distressing pattern that has been documented for years and increasingly draws the focus of policymakers attempting to diversify the profession. As more experts point to the improved academic performance of students who are assigned to even one instructor of the same racial or ethnic background, some advocates have called for states to modify, or , their licensure tests, which are more likely to be a stumbling block to African American and Hispanic candidates.

by the National Council on Teacher Quality, a reform-oriented think tank based in Washington, D.C., puts the issue in perspective. Data gathered from 38 states and the District of Columbia show that a huge portion of prospective elementary school teachers don’t pass their licensing exam on the first try. Of those that fail, non-white teachers are much less likely to re-take the test than their white classmates. And within states, students at different institutions faced radically different odds of ultimately securing a teaching credential. The conclusions will lead many to wonder whether novice educators are receiving enough training before being hired, and what can be done to assist those who weren’t adequately prepared.

NCTQ president Kate Walsh, a longtime and often critical observer of teacher prep programs, said in an interview that while the results were themselves “terrible,” a more pressing concern was the sheer difficulty of obtaining the evidence. State authorities should be active in publicizing that information, she argued, but many don’t even bother to collect it, and even federal efforts to investigate these questions have been “mired in confusion.”

“What’s interesting to me is that states didn’t have this data,” Walsh said. “We thought they did, but almost all states said that this was the first time they’d ever seen this data.”

The national findings, encompassing program-level exam results between 2015 and 2018, demonstrate clearly that large numbers of graduate students struggle to reach the finish line and become licensed teachers. Across all states that provided data, the average “best-attempt” rate for prep programs — the rate at which test-takers ever pass the test, whether or not they fail on their first try — is 83 percent, meaning that roughly one in six don’t realize their ambitions. And certain programs do much better than others: The average gap between the highest-performing and lowest-performing institutions in each state was 44 percentage points.

What’s more, 29 percent of all prep programs reported that less than half of their teaching students passed the licensing exam on their first try. Six states (Connecticut, Florida, Louisiana, New Jersey, South Carolina, and Virginia) were home to at least one program in which no teaching candidate did so.

Florida, which the fourth-most teachers of any state, offers a revealing example. In the three years studied, two different teacher prep institutions saw no teaching candidates pass the Florida Teacher Certification Examinations their first time, though both are tiny programs serving roughly a dozen students between them. Many others — including Florida International University, Florida Gulf Coast University, University of North Florida, and University of Central Florida — reported first-time pass rates of 41 percent or less. All of those schools, which collectively produced over 2,300 test-takers, were rated by NCTQ as among the most selective in the state.

At the same time, a huge number of Florida’s prospective teachers who failed their licensure tests the first time go on to pass in later attempts, likely with the support and encouragement of their prep programs. And a substantial number of programs enrolling large numbers of low-income students (measured via their eligibility to receive Pell grants) report higher first-time pass rates than the average across the state.

Dan Goldhaber, a professor at the University of Washington who directs the Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research (CALDER), called the data “compelling,” adding that researchers might fruitfully study which institutions are able to work best with teaching candidates who initially stumble with the exam.

The findings “begin to open up the teacher preparation black box a little bit and point to where we should be looking for different supports, curricula, interventions that seem to be able to help teacher candidates while they are in teacher preparation,” Goldhaber said.

Dodging the ‘heat’ of publication

In order to reach their findings, NCTQ first had to receive the data from states. A 2019 study, using national results for the commonly used Praxis exam that were provided by the testing vendor ETS, offered somewhat similar findings, but did not delve into differences by state or institution.

Acquiring results at that more granular level was much harder, Walsh said, because some local authorities “didn’t want the heat of being the ones to publish this data.” In all, seven states did not provide timely data on licensure exam performance, and eight provided only partial data. Of the states that did share their data with NCTQ, some had to be subjected to public records requests.

Meagan Comb, director of the Wheelock Educational Policy Center at Boston University and a one-time NCTQ fellow, said she wasn’t particularly surprised at the challenges posed by a third-party examination of test results. In a two-year stint as the director of educator effectiveness at Massachusetts’s Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, Comb oversaw the state’s policy on both teacher preparation and licensure. She recalled that many in the state — considered a national leader in the collection and dissemination of education data — had ached for more information because “it was really hard to know how our pass rates compared with other states.” This often included program heads themselves, who didn’t always have a clear picture of which student groups were struggling or what aspects of the test gave them trouble.

“This report shows that you have to invest in data infrastructure,” Comb Said. There are a lot of states that can’t even link their teacher workforce with their teacher prep candidates, or there’s a state statute prohibiting them from looking at the efficacy of their teacher candidates. I think there’s a lot of opportunity in states across the country to think a lot about the data infrastructure they provide to teacher preparation programs for continuous improvement.”

Goldhaber noted that bottlenecks on data can arise in different areas. While some state education departments are “more inquisitive than others,” he acknowledged, schools of education would often prefer that low pass rates float under the radar.

“I think that, sometimes, the politics are really hard,” he said. “You have important political constituencies — deans, and everything they bring — who sometimes don’t want these data to be out there.”

Lack of transparency can be damaging not only to state authorities, and prep programs themselves, but also to prospective graduate students, some of whom will enroll unwittingly in a teacher prep program where they stand a significant chance of not gaining a license. The risk of failure is especially great for teaching candidates of color, who are significantly less likely than white candidates to retake the exam if they fail. The stress and expenses associated with the test, often amounting to hundreds of dollars in fees or preparation materials, can act as a roadblock to attracting more diverse teachers.

Walsh said that on grounds of consumer protection alone, that had to change.

“The whole point is, you’re supposed to be preparing candidates for licensure. And nobody points out to the kids going into these programs, ‘Your chances of getting a license at this institution are nil.’ So they take their money, take their time, and that’s it.”

Disclosure: The Carnegie Corporation of New York and the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation provide financial support for both the National Council on Teacher Quality and ����Ӱ��.