CALDER seeks to address four research questions:

1. How do teacher policies affect the recruitment, retention and assignment of teachers at the district, school and classroom levels?
   
   
2. How do governance policies, especially accountability policies, affect the recruitment, retention and assignment of teachers at the district, school and classroom levels?
   
   
3. What factors account for teacher effectiveness in terms of student achievement outcomes? To what extent, and in what ways, does the importance of these factors vary for different types of students?
   
   
4. How are the dynamics of social and economic context related to policy, teacher recruitment, retention and assignment, and student outcomes?

Focus: Outcomes for Teachers and Outcomes for Students

Our research questions focus on two major sets of outcomes: outcomes for teachers and outcomes for students.

The teacher outcomes center on who teaches where and when. These outcomes are important because of their relationship to student outcomes and the distribution of those outcomes.

The student outcomes center on student achievement as measured through achievement exams, courses taken, and graduation rates. Figure 1 below depicts our overall research agenda. We will investigate the effects of governance policies and teacher policies on these outcomes. In addition, we will focus on how changing community demographic and financial resource conditions likely affect these relationships. Finally, it is important to note that governance policies can affect not only student outcomes but also teacher policies, and both of these sets of policies are affected by changing demographic and financial conditions.

Student outcomes are, of course, the ultimate outcome of interest for any education effort. But we take teacher outcomes as central to our analysis because teachers matter. This basic fact is not surprising to teachers, parents or school administrators. But the magnitude of the teacher effect—something that has been very difficult to quantify until CALDER researcher Eric Hanushek and his collaborators began working with the Texas data—is what has caught the attention of the policy community. Hanushek reports, "By our estimates from Texas schools, having an above average teacher for five years running can completely close the average gap between low-income students and others" (personal communication to Haycock, 2004).

Research is beginning to uncover some of the factors associated with teaching quality, including teacher experience, academic ability and subject matter expertise. At the same time, we are also learning about the maldistribution of teachers across districts (Clotfelter, Ladd and Vigdor, 2004; forthcoming), schools (Clotfelter, Ladd and Vigdor, 2004; forthcoming; Betts, Rueben and Danenberg, 2000) and classrooms within schools (Clotfelter, Ladd and Vigdor, 2003). At each level students with the greatest need—typically minority and low-income students—are much more likely to have the least effective teachers.

The uneven distribution of quality teachers, and the strong findings about the importance of quality teachers, especially for disadvantaged students, is creating pressure for new policies focused on the recruitment, retention, and assignment of teachers. (There are also counter pressures, for example, from vocal middle class parents for particular teachers for their children and threats from experienced teachers to leave if they do not receive their preferred teaching assignment.)

In addition, incentives associated with accountability policies are introducing pressure for changes in practices associated with teacher recruitment, retention and assignment. We plan to examine both effects as part of our exploration of our first two research questions.