The quality of America's public schools ultimately depends on the competence and commitment of its teachers. As the National Commission on Teaching and America's Future reported last September, the single most important strategy for achieving the nation's education goals is to recruit, prepare, and support excellent teachers for every school. We are not now doing that. Schools of education are not adequately preparing teachers. Bureaucratic hiring procedures frustrate their entry into the profession, and ineffective licensing systems place unqualified teachers in too many classrooms.
Studies show that teacher expertise matters.
A study by Ronald F. Ferguson, a Harvard University researcher, estimates that each additional dollar spent on more highly qualified teachers nets greater gains in student performance than any other use of school resources. But measuring teacher quality is not easy. States license teachers, and most require teachers to pass some kind of test to receive a license. But these tests have been widely criticized as inadequate to measure teaching skill. And in many states the cutoff scores are so low that there is no effective standard for entry.