Addressing the Teacher Qualification Gap

Addressing the Teacher Qualification Gap: Exploring the Use and Efficacy of Incentives to Reward Teachers for Tough Assignments

By Dan Goldhaber, 32 Pages

Policy makers, practitioners, and educational leaders have begun to take notice of the maldistribution of teachers across schools. Less effective teachers are more likely to be assigned to low performing schools with high concentrations of poor and minority students. States, therefore, are attempting to mitigate these inequities by employing strategies like offering loan forgiveness or salary supplements for teachers who work in high-poverty schools, improving working conditions in these schools, and building up the teacher pipe-line so there are available educators to hire.
While these attempts are commendable, little is known about how well these strategies work.

This report by Dan Goldhaber addresses labor-economic theory and the politics associated with teacher-equity reforms. Goldhaber explores what is known about impact of incentives to make recommendations designed to help address teacher equity. The paper discusses teacher preferences, the teacher labor market, the magnitude and development of teacher inequities, and policies designed to address the inequitable distribution of teachers.

At the end of the report, Goldhaber makes four recommendations:
1. Create and maintain state data systems that allow analyses of teacher distribution and the efficacy of policies designed to address that distribution. This will require, at minimum, the ability to match teachers with schools, students, and the characteristics of those schools and students over time.

2. Implement new teacher policies simultaneously with a plan to study their effects, with the understanding that such studies are unlikely to be completed for several years.:

3. Require school districts to report spending at each school on a real-dollar basis.

4. Develop and tap into new high-quality sources of teachers that are specifically targeted toward schools serving disadvantaged students.