Our Approach

The National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) is on a mission to ensure every child has effective teachers and every teacher has the opportunity to be effective.

Building on two decades of research and policy analysis, we have marshalled our resources behind two big bets for achieving an effective, diverse teacher workforce:

Bet #1. Aligning the preparation of new elementary teachers to research-driven practices, imparting to them the knowledge and skills necessary for their students to flourish.

Bet #2. Strengthening the policies and practices that will lead to the highest quality teacher workforce, specifically recruitment, assignment, evaluation, development, and compensation.

Founded in 2000, we are the only nonprofit, nonpartisan organization solely dedicated to issues of teacher quality. We are staffed by a number of former teachers and funded by a broad range of foundations and philanthropic individuals and do not accept federal funding.

NCTQ's approach to achieving an effective, diverse teacher workforce is through greater transparency and higher standards among the institutions that exert influence and authority over teachers: states, school districts, and teacher preparation programs.

Over our history, NCTQ has amassed the largest repository of data on the teacher workforce outside the U.S. government with unique datasets that capture state laws and policies, teacher contracts and school board policies, and the practices of teacher preparation programs. These groundbreaking datasets have served as a catalyst for driving improvements in teacher preparation, achieving greater diversity in the field, improving elementary reading instruction, strengthening state regulations, and implementation of strategic pay structures, among other education advancements.

We share our data freely with the public but we also use it to conduct our own original analyses, linking it to high quality, peer reviewed research and best practices from across the world to inform actionable, evidence-based recommendations.

Core Datasets

• Teacher Prep Review — The most comprehensive dataset on the nation's 1,200 elementary teacher preparation programs that captures program practices, down to the course level, on a set of factors that most closely links to success in the classroom, including institutional pass rates on elementary licensing tests.

• State Teacher Policy Database — A compilation of state laws and regulations concerning oversight of teacher preparation, licensure, alternate routes, equitable assignment of teachers, evaluation, tenure, dismissals, layoffs, compensation strategies, and much more.

• Teacher Contract Database — The only one-stop collection of teacher contracts, board policies, school calendars, and salary schedules for 150 large school districts, which include the nation's 100 largest districts as well as the largest district in every state.