Improving Teacher Quality in American Education
This paper examines what it truly means to improve teacher quality in American schools by reviewing four research articles on teacher characteristics, student achievement, and performance incentives. The paper explores why traditional proxies for teacher quality — such as IQ, certification, grades, and years of experience — show weak correlations with classroom effectiveness. It also addresses the difficulty of measuring student achievement through standardized tests and grade point averages. Finally, it evaluates Victor Lavy's research on merit-based pay incentives and concludes that continued vocational teacher education combined with performance-related financial incentives represent the most cost-effective strategies for raising teaching quality.
- The Call for Better Teachers: Policy rhetoric and research on teacher quality
- Assessing Teacher Quality Before the Classroom: Weak links between credentials and effectiveness
- Measuring Student Achievement and Its Limitations: Grade inflation and standardized test shortcomings
- Incentive-Based Programs and Teacher Performance: Merit pay study results in Israeli schools
- Conclusion: Toward More Effective Strategies: Best policy options for improving teacher quality
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What makes this paper effective
- The paper grounds its central claim — that "better teachers" is an underspecified policy goal — in concrete research, using multiple studies to expose the gap between popular rhetoric and measurable outcomes.
- It moves logically from the difficulty of pre-hiring assessment, to the difficulty of measuring student outcomes, to a constructive solution in the form of incentive-based programs, giving the argument a clear forward momentum.
- The paper draws on a real empirical study (Lavy, 2004) with specific methodological detail, lending credibility to its policy recommendation without overstating the findings.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper demonstrates effective use of a literature synthesis structure: rather than summarizing each source in sequence, it organizes the evidence thematically — qualifications, outcomes, incentives — and uses each source to build a cumulative argument. This approach allows the writer to identify gaps in the existing research and position one study's findings as the most actionable conclusion.
Structure breakdown
The paper opens with a policy hook and then surveys evidence on pre-hiring quality markers (experience, IQ, certification). It pivots to the challenge of measuring student performance and grade inflation before introducing Lavy's merit-pay study as a solution. The conclusion synthesizes findings and extends the lesson to organizational management more broadly, closing with a generalizable takeaway.
The Call for Better Teachers
How can we improve education in America today? The common answer is: better teachers. But why don't school administrators simply hire "better teachers"? It is not nearly as easy to determine what makes a better teacher as it is to assert that higher-quality educators ought to be hired. By assessing four recent articles on the quality assessment of teaching qualifications, teaching results, student performance, and programs designed to encourage higher teacher performance, a greater degree of clarity and specificity can be brought to the often vague assertion that teaching "quality" needs to improve.
How often has the call for better teachers been sounded when issues of educational policy are debated? The argument goes that it is not more money, longer hours, better facilities, or newer textbooks that are needed — so long as "better teachers" are hired, things will automatically improve. A 2005 article by the Office of Educational Accountability entitled "Teacher Characteristics" cited more than a decade's worth of studies prioritizing the selection of quality educators as key to improving America's schools: "A 1994 national survey by the Public Agenda (Johnson & Immerwahr, 1994) indicated that Americans ranked 'good teachers' as the most important thing public schools need in order to do a good job. A consensus process conducted in 1996 with over 200 Minnesotans also identified 'quality teaching' as the most salient predictive indicator of the success of our system (Bruininks, Bielinski, Danielson, et al., 1996). In 1996, the National Commission on Teaching and America's Future issued their report, What Matters Most: Teaching for America's Future, in which the Council concluded that effective school reform would depend primarily on investments aimed at providing teachers with increased access to the knowledge they need to meet the demands of the profession (as cited in Darling-Hammond, 1998)."
To summarize the findings of both "Teacher Characteristics" and "Teacher Quality and Student Achievement," another quantitative assessment of teacher quality (Darling-Hammond, 2000): "As new standards for student learning have been introduced across the states, greater attention has been given to the role that teacher quality plays in student achievement." The key word is always quality. There is, of course, some truth to the generalization that America needs better educators. However, once one accepts "quality teaching" as the defining goal, one must survey the available research to determine which particular teacher-related variables are most highly correlated with greater levels of student achievement.
Assessing Teacher Quality Before the Classroom
Assessing who will prove to be a good teacher before they enter the classroom is difficult. For instance, there is little strong relationship between measures of IQ and overall teacher effectiveness. The findings connecting subject-matter knowledge and teacher effectiveness are also not as strong and consistent as one might suppose. There is a somewhat stronger and more consistently positive influence of specifically education-related coursework on teachers' effectiveness. The Office of Educational Accountability article on "Teacher Characteristics" cites an earlier study finding that increased levels of vocationally directed teacher education had a statistically significant effect on student outcomes. In addition, "research into the characteristics of successful teachers has consistently pointed to the benefits of educating our future teachers in both the science of teaching and in their selected subject areas or disciplines" (Office of Educational Accountability, 2005).
While many studies have established that inexperienced teachers — those with fewer than three years of experience — are typically less effective than more senior colleagues, the benefits of experience appear to level off after about five years, especially in non-collegial work environments. Similarly, evaluations comparing teacher certification and classroom efficacy have shown little correlation (Darling-Hammond, 2000). Thus, evaluating teacher quality based on past education level, formal certification and credentials, years of experience, and IQ proves a difficult and unreliable prospect.
Conclusion: Toward More Effective Strategies
Of the four articles reviewed, two strategies have emerged as showing a statistically significant improvement in the quality of education: increasing the affordability and availability of continued vocational education in the professional field of teaching (as opposed to subject-area education alone), and increasing the financial and professional incentives for teachers to commit to their students and to their school's overall academic improvement.
Standardized tests may prove difficult to use as a reliable measurement of success, given that students come from a variety of backgrounds and that tests measure aptitude on some level in addition to educational quality — they do not account for how far a student has come. Simply recruiting more intelligent people into teaching is not necessarily the answer either. What is needed are teachers who are more competent and more motivated to teach, regardless of student ability and motivation. Thus, expanding access to continuing education and providing performance-based financial bonuses may be the most cost-effective and motivational tools available to most school districts seeking to raise overall teacher quality.
This lesson applies beyond the classroom. For organizations of all kinds, monetary incentives tied to higher quality output — measured from where employees began before the bonuses were introduced — combined with job-related training rather than generic professional development, creates a more motivated and higher-performing workforce.
Works Cited
Darling-Hammond, L. (2000). Teacher quality and student achievement: A review of state policy evidence. Retrieved April 28, 2005, from
Grades rise while test scores languish. (2001, August 15). Daily Policy Digest. National Center for Policy Analysis.
Lavy, Victor. (2004). Performance pay and teachers' effort, productivity, and grading ethics. National Bureau of Economic Research. Retrieved April 28, 2005, from http://www.nber.org/papers/W10622
Office of Educational Accountability. (2005). Teacher characteristics. Retrieved April 28, 2005, from http://education.umn.edu/oea/II/BestPractices/Admin_and_Policy/TeacherCharacteristics/TeacherCharacteristics.htm
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