Lifting Teacher Performance

public school teaching force is neither as good as it could be nor as good as it must be to prepare our children for a global economy. Certainly, the nation has thousands of highly skilled, dedicated teachers. But, since the 1960s, the quality of the teaching profession has declined. Even more troubling, there are huge teacher quality disparities between poor and affluent schools. Disadvantaged children—those who most need excellent teachers—are the least likely to have them. It is time for policymakers to realize that the status quo methods of improving teacher quality simply do not work. Many of the old solutions favored by education groups to improve teacher quality—such as raising teacher salaries across the board, improving training, and requiring certification—have not fixed the problem. Indeed, one of the most popular education policy proposals of recent years, cutting class sizes, risks unintentionally lowering teacher quality even further, as affluent districts make up their numbers by poaching the most capable teachers from poorer areas. The trouble is that these status quo solutions do not focus on the real problem driving Policy Report April 2005