About Us
Research has confirmed large disparities in student learning gains in different teachers’ classrooms. Such findings have generated a flurry of policy proposals aimed at harnessing the power of “teacher quality,” such as assigning merit pay based on value-added scores, identifying and requiring “highly qualified” teachers based on credentials, paying bonuses for teachers certified by the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS), and hiring exemplary teachers as math and reading coaches.
However, even as many of these proposals move forward, analysts vigorously debate how best to measure teacher effectiveness. Some proposals focus on using student outcomes; others focus on traits of effective teachers; others prefer to measure features of instruction that are thought to be effective. Unfortunately, few bridges exist between these disparate approaches to measuring teacher effectiveness. As a result, despite decades of research, the field has made only modest progress toward understanding the characteristics of effective teachers and measures of effective instruction.
As part of a five-year grant from the Institute for Educational Sciences, the National Center for Teacher Effectiveness will join the strands of research together and accelerate the search for a valid, scalable measure of teacher effectiveness. The center has four primary goals:
Unify three disparate strands of research: “value added” modeling, the direct study of math instruction, and non-instructional predictors of teacher effectiveness.
Develop an empirically-derived composite measure of teacher effectiveness.
Operationalize the measures to ensure they are usable in the field.
Externally validate the estimated differences in teacher effectiveness.
