Better Teachers, Better Schools
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As a new presidential term and a new Congress begin, the Center for American Progress has launched the Progressive Priorities Project to provide policymakers and the public a positive vision for progressive policymaking supported by a series of new and bold policy ideas in priority areas identified by American Progress. Ensuring a High-Quality Education by Building a Stronger Teaching Force is the second of approximately a dozen papers in the series that American Progress will issue over the course of the next two months. In addition to providing broad policy recommendations, each of the papers in the series proposes specific steps that policymakers can take to achieve the broader policy goals. All of the papers in the series will be compiled and published as a book in early 2005.
Ensuring a High-Quality Education for Every Child by Building a Stronger Teaching Force
Next in importance to freedom and justice is popular education, without which neither freedom nor justice can be permanently maintained.
—James A. Garfield, Twentieth President of the United States
Executive Summary
The Center for American Progress proposes a federal education agenda that builds the capacity of public schools to provide a high-quality education for all students by greatly strengthening America's teaching workforce. Recent research provides convincing evidence that teacher quality plays a critical role in whether and how much students learn from year to year. Unfortunately, teachers are too seldom treated as an important resource in America's schools, let alone our most precious one.
In this chapter of the Progressive Priorities Series, we urge the president and the Congress to carve out an aggressive national strategy to assure that every public school student in America is taught by highly qualified, well-trained and adequately supported teachers. This chapter provides a step-by-step blueprint for establishing such an agenda in the following five key areas: (1) increasing the quality and quantity of information about America's teacher workforce, and encouraging the use of such data for greater accountability and smarter decisionmaking; (2) creating enriched career advancement structures that treat teaching as a clinical practice profession much like medicine; (3) improving teacher recruitment and preparation in higher education, and ensuring that similar standards for teacher quality are maintained across alternate routes to the profession; (4) providing targeted incentives and enforcing existing laws to decrease inequities in access to qualified teachers and better match teacher skills with student needs; and (5) creating instructional environments that maximize teacher effectiveness and reduce teacher turnover in high-poverty schools.