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Spotlight On: Creating Solutions
Center for Teaching Quality
The Challenge
Few policy makers or researchers dispute that teachers are the most important determinant of student achievement. However, little consensus exists on the best way to recruit, prepare, and reward teachers. We are now faced with a severe shortage of fully prepared teachers. Underprepared teachers are concentrated in schools and communities that serve our most economically disadvantaged students – the students most in need of our best teachers.
What They’re Doing
The Center for Teaching Quality (CTQ) has formed a nationwide TeacherSolutions project, with many of the nation’s best teachers focusing their attention on professional compensation, researching past efforts to create alternative pay models, and crafting new and different solutions based on their understanding of the professional work of teachers.
My involvement in the TLN Forum has had a profound impact on my teaching and leadership in one of our state’s most challenged schools... It is the teacher community I’ve been searching for all my professional life.
Betsy Rogers, 2003 National Teacher of the Year
CTQ has also created the Teacher Leaders Network Forum, a venue for accomplished teachers to share their collective understanding of teaching quality, student learning, and sound education policy. Virtual collaboration allows these busy professionals to work together on projects, participate in discussions with national experts, refine their leadership and advocacy skills, and publish their writing and action research in national venues.
What We’re Learning
A central tenet of the approach recommended by the TeacherSolutions team is that a viable compensation framework must be flexible enough to allow districts and states to tailor incentives that advance their specific student-learning goals – with the expectation that teachers will be full partners in the design. The Stuart Foundation is deeply interested in this work and will continue to follow its progress.