A Manifesto Everyone agrees that America needs better teachers in the classroom, yet there is little agreement about how to recruit them. Yet there's no persuasive evidence that the regulatory approach has succeeded in raising teacher quality in the past or that it will do so in the future. This overview of recent data on the quality of our nation's teaching force contains much bad, if often familiar, news. No measure of teacher quality is perfect, but most of the measures that do exist are discouraging.
Teachers have weak verbal and quantitative skills as measured by various tests.
Not nearly enough of them have a college major or minor in the subject that they teach. And only one in five teachers reports feeling prepared to teach in today's classrooms. These findings, combined with U.S. students' poor performance on national and international tests, bring home the urgency of the teacher quality problem. A Layman's Guide Dale Ballou and Michael Podgursky Concern over the quality of U.S. teachers has renewed interest in the ways they are prepared and licensed. Podgursky and Ballou conclude that such policies are misguided.