How do governance policies, especially accountability policies, affect the recruitment, retention and assignment of teachers at the district, school and classroom levels (who teaches what students) and student outcomes (student achievement and attainment)?
The No Child Left Behind Act requires states and districts to take decisive action to remedy the teacher quality problem. Action can include instituting some of the incentives and professional support policies identified in CALDER Research Question 1.
But the types of policies, and the vigor with which they are implemented and enforced, may be related to the stringency of state and local accountability policies. That is, we might see greater effort to address teacher quality in locations where the performance targets and accountability consequences are more serious.
If accountability for student performance is weak, perhaps because of low standards, one can imagine efforts to simply "game" the system with bogus measures of teacher quality. One can also imagine a state that provides considerable supplemental support to low-performing schools, such as Florida, to be more successful in attracting/retaining high quality teachers in low performing schools.
Because we will investigate these issues in multiple states, with different state accountability policies and with different provisions for professional support, we will be able to sort out some of these interactions.
Similarly, we might also expect policies that affect the locus of hiring authority to interact with teacher and accountability policies. States and districts differ in the ways in which, and the extent to which, for example, principals are able to hire and allocate their staff and other resources.
Recent findings of Loeb and Strunk (2005), for example, suggest that accountability policies are more effective where principals report more control over hiring and resource allocation. Schools within districts, especially charter schools, also differ by definition from regular public schools in terms of school-level control.
Our comprehensive databases allow us to examine possibly differential effects on who gets hired where, and who stays, by the locus of hiring authority as well as the effectiveness of accountability policies under these conditions. Districts also differ in the ways their human resource offices operate and their effect on hiring practices. How district human resource offices respond to policy pressures for quality teachers, especially in low-performing schools, is an important part of the picture to be investigated, as we note in CALDER Research Question 4.
Other CALDER Research Questions:
Or, go back to the description of outcomes examined by CALDER research.
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