State Efforts to Promote Equitable Access to Effective Teachers

In recent years, federal education programs and policies have increasingly focused on teacher quality as a means for closing achievement gaps, in part by directing states to measure teacher qualifications and performance and to promote equitable access to qualified and effective teachers among schools within a district. This report provides a broad overview of state efforts, as of the 2011-12 school year, to monitor equitable access to qualified and effective teachers among schools; develop and adopt multiple measures of teacher performance to rate teachers among at least three performance levels; and implement targeted strategies for promoting equitable access to qualified and effective teachers. This report uses the following definitions: (1) measures of teacher qualifications include "highly qualified teacher" (HQT) status, as defined in the 2001 reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 (ESEA), as well as years of teaching experience; (2) measures of teacher performance include measures of student achievement growth and/or teacher practice; and (3) multiple measures of teacher performance refer to measures of both student achievement growth and teacher practice. Key findings from this study include: (1) In 2011-12, states most commonly monitored equitable access to qualified and effective teachers among schools by using measures of teacher qualifications; (2) Four states reported using measures of teacher performance--student achievement growth and/or measures of teacher practice--to monitor equitable access to qualified and effective teachers among schools, and nine states used teacher performance measures to monitor the quality of the teacher workforce overall; (3) In two of the four states that reported using teacher performance measures to monitor equitable access among schools, officials reported seeing larger inequities than were previously detected using measures of teacher qualifications alone; (4) Six states reported that they were using multiple measures of teacher performance to rate teachers on at least three performance levels in 2011-12, and 38 states indicated that they were in the process of developing such measures; (5) Offering monetary incentives was the most common strategy that states reported using to promote equitable access to qualified and effective teachers among schools (24 states); and (6) Other state-reported strategies for promoting equitable access to qualified and effective teachers were specialized professional development (14 states) and teacher recruitment and preparation programs (14 states). [For the results in brief, see ED612717.]