Research & Insights

Tenure, a hotly debated education policy lever, is often viewed as a component of a teacher’s overall compensation package.

There’s clear evidence that teachers are more effective reading instructors with special education students when both their preservice preparation and their school district emphasize evidence-based reading practices.

When we sow benign neglect, it’s no wonder we reap mediocrity.

For school districts looking to fulfill staffing needs, hosting student teachers offers many advantages to creating a pool of effective new teachers.

New data show the extent of the mismatch between teachers’ certification and the area in which teachers are needed.

For Black teachers, discussing important issues such as the Capitol Insurrection or Black Lives Matter Movement in a safe and meaningful way with students can be difficult, but is possible with some planning. One teacher shares her experience and why she feels these conversations are necessary.

Twenty three years after the U.S. Congress first tried to dislodge the pass rates on teacher licensing tests, the dam has been broken.

Elementary teachers need to know the content they will teach.

The nation needs a strong, diverse teacher workforce to fulfill its promise of equal opportunity for all. While licensure tests serve as an important guardrail to ensure teachers have acquired the skills and knowledge they need to deliver on this promise, aspiring elementary teachers are too often poorly prepared and supported to pass their state licensure tests. In many states, less than half of all test takers pass their state licensure tests, with even lower pass rates reported for candidates of color.

In this report, NCTQ explores the research behind the importance of licensure tests; highlights recommendations for states, prep programs, and testing companies to use data from licensure tests to inform and strengthen preparation for aspiring teachers, , and offers interactive state-specific dashboards where education leaders can dig deeper into detailed pass rate data that has never before been published. Publishing this data is a foundational first step to shift the burden from candidates to the entities that prepare them.

In a market economy where everything has a cost and people decide freely where to work, salaries are the quintessential incentive for attracting the right person to the right position. This is as true for the teaching profession as it is for others. In this brief, NCTQ explores and compares the salary trajectories of teachers in 90 large school districts across the country, answering questions like:

• Which districts offer their teachers more over the course of their careers?
• How can differentiated pay incentivize teachers to stay in their jobs?
• How can salary structures incentivize the wrong things?
• Do teacher salaries stack up to what comparable professions pay?

The brief also offers key takeaways for ways districts can be more strategic with compensation and highlights districts which are leading the way.

A new study focused on Massachusetts finds a direct link between its performance rating of providers with the future effectiveness of providers’ graduates in classrooms.

To attract teachers to rural areas we either have to come up with a significant and steady infusion of cash—or life in rural America needs to become a more attractive proposition.

Information gleaned from licensure tests can offer a compass, guiding efforts to strengthen and diversify the teacher workforce.

As districts begin to
plan what the next school year will look like, we analyze how teacher planning
and collaboration time are currently being addressed in the nation’s largest
districts.

Strengthening our teacher workforce begins with better, more transparent data.

The University of North Carolina’s Dr. Laura Bilbro-Berry discusses how the UNC System created a structured framework to help improve what future elementary teachers learn about reading instruction across all of its campuses.

Tennessee State University’s Dr. Jerri Haynes on how their college of education worked to ensure its teacher candidates were better prepared to teach elementary students how to read.

Policymakers and teacher prep programs often claim there’s an extremely limited pool of effective mentor teachers when pairing them with student-teachers. A new study aims to find out if that’s actually the case.

A new study adds to the mix research that unpacks which candidates particularly benefit from high-quality student teaching placements.

For school district leaders, a crucial strategy for hiring a strong, effective teacher workforce is to offer competitive salaries.

Some remarkable progress is being made by Arkansas, North Carolina, Colorado, and Texas on the teacher quality agenda.

We examine the extent to which beginning teachers are receiving any form of compensating differentials that would help increase teacher retention during the first few years in the classroom.

A new study out of Chicago has garnered a lot of attention for finding that Black teachers were significantly more likely to receive low classroom observation scores as compared to their White peers.

Many efforts to increase diversity focus on getting more teachers of color to the door of the classroom, with too little attention to what comes after.