Tapping the Potential - Alliance for Excellent Education

A L L I A N C E F O R E X C E L L E N T E D U C AT I O Nteacher degrees on student performance in the subject areas of mathematics, science,English, and history. The NELS: 88 was a nationally representative survey of about24,000 eighth graders in 1988, approximately 18,000 of whom were surveyed again in1990. It was found that several teacher characteristics do appear to make a differencein student performance. Teachers certified in mathematics and those with bachelor’sor master’s degrees in mathematics and science were associated with higher studentperformance scores. Mathematics and science degrees were not found to influence studentoutcomes in English and history, suggesting that it is the subject-specific trainingrather than general teaching ability that results in improved performance. This findingsuggests that student achievement in technical subjects can be improved by requiringin-subject teaching.Hanushek, Eric, John Kain, and Steven Rivkin. “Why Public Schools LoseTeachers.” National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper no. W8599 (2001).Many school districts experience difficulties attracting and retaining teachers, andthe impending retirement of a substantial fraction of public school teachers raises thespecter of severe shortages in some public schools. Schools in urban areas serving economicallydisadvantaged and minority students appear particularly vulnerable. Thispaper investigates the factors that affect the probability that teachers switch schools orexit the public schools entirely. The authors make use of matched student/teacherpanel data on Texas public elementary schools to gain a better understanding of theeffects of salary and other school factors on teacher transitions.The results show that teacher transitions are much more strongly related to particularstudent characteristics than to salary differentials. Schools serving large numbers ofacademically disadvantaged, black, or Hispanic students tend to lose a substantial fractionof teachers each year both to other districts and out of the Texas public schoolsentirely. An implication is that the supply curve faced by these districts differs markedlyfrom that faced by middle- and upper-middle-class communities, in which a far lowerproportion of teachers seek to improve their employment arrangement by switching toanother public school.Hinds, Michael. Teaching as a Clinical Profession. New York: CarnegieCorporation of New York, 2002.This is an analysis of the teaching profession in terms of teacher preparation andpractice in the first years of teaching. The report recommends that teaching become aclinical practice profession like that of medicine, including the use of “clinical residencies”that function as highly structured induction programs facilitated by institutions ofhigher education. This report details the rationale behind the Carnegie Corporation’sTeachers for a New Era initiative.Ingersoll, Richard. Is There Really a Teacher Shortage? Seattle: Center for theStudy of Teaching and Policy, 2003.Richard Ingersoll builds on his hypothesis that school staffing problems are not primarilydue to teacher shortages, in the sense of an insufficient supply of qualifiedteachers. Rather, the data indicate that staffing problems are primarily due to a “revolv-58