This book asks whether higher salaries have improved the quality of newly recruited teachers. It reviews data on the characteristics of beginning teachers and shows how important features of the labor market for teachers systematically undermine efforts to improve teacher quality. The text also offers a comparison of personnel policies and staffing patterns in public and private schools, focusing on national trends in teacher recruitment. It discusses ways to measure teacher quality, examines several indicators of quality, such as student achievement and principals' ratings of their staffs, and then uses these findings to assess the evidence on salary growth and teacher recruitment. It looks at what has gone wrong with teacher recruitment and offers an analysis of the operation of the teacher labor market so as to interpret findings. These results are used to review the implications for teacher recruitment of various other reforms of current interest. The text also describes the prospects for reform by examining salary differentiation and rising standards and assesses personnel policies in the private sector to see whether private schools offer a model for reforming public education. This section details teacher quality, working conditions, and compensation policies. The book concludes with a summation of its major points. (Contains an index, approximately 315 references, 12 data tables and 17 figures.) (RJM)

This review of existing teacher compensation models provides school administrators with a research-based approach for developing a compensation system that attracts and retains high-quality teachers.

Teacher quality is the single most important school-related factor influencing student success. The author examines the body of research on the subject of teacher quality to draw conclusions about which attributes makes teachers most effective, (experience, preparation programs and degrees, type of certification, specific coursework taken in preparation for the profession, and teachers' own test scores), with a focus on aspects of teacher quality that can be translated into policy recommendations and incorporated into teaching practice.

TEACHER ASSESSMENT AND THE QUEST FOR TEACHER QUALITY Teacher Assessment and the Quest for Teacher Quality is an essential resource that provides school leaders, administrators, and teacher educators with a wide range of perspectives on the complex issue of teacher quality. The book examines assessment in the context of preparation, licensure, hiring, tenure, and even dismissal and explores a wealth of relevant topics. Comprehensive in scope, the handbook includes contributions from leading experts in the field of teacher quality and teacher assessment. This important book contains basic information on a variety of approaches to teacher assessment and teacher quality topics including the science and psychology of teacher selection, performance-based assessments, and hiring decisions. In addition, the contributors explore the role of formative assessments in new teacher induction, assessing for teacher tenure, various approaches to annual performance assessments, assessing teacher contributions to student achievement, and the law regarding teacher dismissals. The expert authors also tackle broader assessment issues including the interpretation of assessments, standards for teacher evaluation, and the inherent dilemma posed by measuring the quality of teaching. For the goal of ensuring quality teaching for all our students, Teacher Assessment and the Quest for Teacher Quality is an important resource and a lasting contribution to the literature on the topic.

Unlike the United States, Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom have developed (3z (Bvalue-added (3y (B immigration policies designed to boost GDP and per-capita incomes. These countries accept the proposition that markets are valuable institutions. But they also recognize that in highly competitive globalized economies, markets untempered by moderating policies and institutions will produce declining real incomes for many or most workers and unsustainable inequalities in income and wealth. In Value-Added Immigration Ray Marshall details how these three major U.S. trading partners developed their immigration policies, how these policies work, and what specific features can be adapted for the creation of a high-value-added U.S. immigration policy. Marshall, professor emeritus at the LBJ School of Public Affairs, University of Texas at Austin, served as secretary of labor in the Carter administration.

Reviews recent analyses of relative teacher compensation and provides a detailed analysis of trends in the relative weekly pay of elementary and secondary school teachers. Shows that teacher compensation lags that of workers with similar education and experience, as well as that of workers with comparable skill requirements, like accountants, reporters, registered nurses, computer programmers, clergy, personnel officers, and vocational counselors and inspectors. Finds that teachers' weekly wages have grown far more slowly than those for these comparable occupations; teacher wages have deteriorated about 14.8 percent since 1993 and by 12.0 percent since 1983 relative to comparable occupations.

Schools are places of learning but they are also workplaces, and teachers are employees. As such, are teachers more akin to professionals or to factory workers in the amount of control they have over their work? And what difference does it make? Drawing on large national surveys as well as wide-ranging interviews with high school teachers and administrators, Richard Ingersoll reveals the shortcomings in the two opposing viewpoints that dominate thought on this subject: that schools are too decentralized and lack adequate control and accountability; and that schools are too centralized, giving teachers too little autonomy. Both views, he shows, overlook one of the most important parts of teachers' work: schools are not simply organizations engineered to deliver academic instruction to students, as measured by test scores; schools and teachers also play a large part in the social and behavioral development of our children. As a result, both views overlook the power of implicit social controls in schools that are virtually invisible to outsiders but keenly felt by insiders. Given these blind spots, this book demonstrates that reforms from either camp begin with inaccurate premises about how schools work and so are bound not only to fail, but to exacerbate the problems they propose to solve.

Accreditation of teacher education programs is increasingly embraced internationally and is being modeled after the American experience, despite criticisms from some in the field of teacher education in the United States. This book examines the transformation of accreditation and the interest and perception of nations and regions choosing to use the model in their own culture, including the Middle East and Gulf Region, South America, and the United Kingdom. Its distinctive edge is the juxtaposition of three sectors: quality assurance/accreditation, teacher preparation, and global/international experiences. The authors address how the adoption of a universal requirement for accreditation embraces a particular view of what teacher quality means. The emphasis on the development of teacher preparation in concert with accreditation is of academic interest to scholars in the United States and abroad. The experiences and voices of teacher educators as international colleagues in a global climate of accountability brings a fresh perspective on shared challenges.

This volume offers insights from modeling relations between teacher quality, instructional quality and student outcomes in mathematics across countries. The relations explored take the educational context, such as school climate, into account. The International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement’s Trends in Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) is the only international large-scale study possessing a design framework that enables investigation of relations between teachers, their teaching, and student outcomes in mathematics. TIMSS provides both student achievement data and contextual background data from schools, teachers, students and parents, for over 60 countries. This book makes a major contribution to the field of educational effectiveness, especially teaching effectiveness, where cross-cultural comparisons are scarce. For readers interested in teacher quality, instructional quality, and student achievement and motivation in mathematics, the comparisons across cultures, grades, and time are insightful and thought-provoking. For readers interested in methodology, the advanced analytical methods, combined with application of methods new to educational research, illustrate interesting novel directions in methodology and the secondary analysis of international large-scale assessment (ILSA).