In his State of the Union address, President Clinton proposed hiring 100,000 new teachers to reduce primary-grade class sizes nationwide. Although class-size reduction is a worthy objective, the most potent aspect of the President's $12.4 billion teacher initiative is its potential to help states and school districts improve teacher quality by rethinking the way they recruit and train teachers. Boosting teacher quality, not quantity, should be the ultimate goal of federal activity.

Although there are outstanding teachers in American schools, there are not enough of them to provide all of America's students with the cognitive skills they need--especially in high-poverty schools. The President's call for national testing of fourth and eighth graders last year rightly elicited this response: If we are going to hold all students to higher standards, we must ensure high quality teachers in every classroom. In anticipation of the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act this year, which includes federal aid to schools of education, Sens. Jack Reed (D-RI), Jeff Bingaman (D-NM), Bill Frist (R-TN), Ted Kennedy (D-MA), and Reps. George Miller (D-CA) and Bill Paxon (R-NY), have offered different plans to address the teacher crunch, including proposals to regulate teacher training institutions; provide funding to schools of education to develop partnerships with school districts and elementary and secondary schools; give block grants to states to hire 100,000 new teachers; and provide loan forgiveness to teachers who serve in high-poverty schools.

These congressional proposals reflect a growing sense that overall teacher quality is not as high as it needs to be. The students who enroll in teacher education programs in U.S. colleges tend to have lower scores on SAT and ACT exams than those in virtually all other programs of study.¹ Large numbers of teachers have had trouble passing tests of basic skills. Districts that have attempted to upgrade their work force have found that a majority of teacher applicants struggle with the examinations that they expect their own high school graduates to pass. For example, last year the Connetquot district in Long Island, NY, had 758 applicants for 35 spots. As a screening device, district officials required applicants to answer at least 40 out of 50 multiple-choice reading comprehension questions from old Regents exams given to high school juniors. Of the 758 applicants, all of whom had baccalaureate degrees and teaching certificates, only 202 met this 11th grade standard.

At least this suburban district still had many more applicants than positions. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Spring 1997 edition of Occupation Outlook Quarterly, "In recent years, the job market for teachers has been characterized by keen competition, especially for high-paying jobs in desirable locations, due to the large supply of qualified applicants." However, there are teacher shortages in high-poverty urban and rural districts, where administrators must resort to hiring teachers with little or no background in the subjects they teach. This is an especially grave problem since no one is subsequently held accountable for their students' performance. The chronic shortage of good teachers in many urban and rural systems will intensify as student enrollments surge, class sizes get smaller, and teachers retire in large numbers over the coming years.

To recruit and retain effective teachers, schools need to be attractive workplaces. High-poverty schools face shortages in large part because they are unsafe, salaries are lower than affluent suburban districts, bureaucratic red-tape interferes with teachers' efforts to do their jobs, and teachers do not have the necessary supplies and resources. However, there are policies related specifically to teaching that can do much to improve the profession. As the Administration develops the specifics of its teacher training plan, the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) urges that the President and his advisors remain faithful to the most important achievement in education policy: redefining the goal of school reform as results, not regulation. Instead of spending federal dollars to hire more teachers and support schools of education under the existing system, the Administration should encourage states to open up the teaching profession to talented individuals who can demonstrate mastery of the subject they intend to teach²; implement innovative means of recruiting and training teachers; provide incentives to teach in high-poverty schools; and ensure that institutions, administrators, and teachers are rewarded for high performance and held responsible for failure.

Policy Implications

PPI has long envisioned an education system that demands results in exchange for the freedom to innovate. The time has come to stop tinkering with the existing, highly centralized and bureaucratic education system and replace it with a more flexible, diverse, and innovative system that delivers world-class performance. The way we recruit, train, and reward teachers for performance is a fundamental component of this new system.

States, school districts, and individual schools are ultimately responsible for teacher recruitment and hiring practices, but the President and Congress can use federal dollars as a lever to encourage state and local governments to adopt results- based policies. The President has proposed spending $7.3 billion over the next five years to ensure "a competent teacher in every classroom." PPI recommends that the President use the money in the following ways:

The federal government should offer challenge grants to states for the purpose of reducing entry barriers to the teaching profession. States should be eligible to use federal funds to establish meaningful alternative certification programs that have more than a marginal effect on teacher supply, and to create new teacher- licensing policies that substitute subject matter teacher examinations for traditional requirements based on degrees and course work.

The federal government should break the education school monopoly on teacher preparation. Any federal funds set aside for training should be available to any program that trains teachers, not just schools of education. Independent, non-profit groups such as Teach for America and individual schools should be eligible to use the funds for "on-the-job" training, or in other ways that they see fit. Funds should not be used to create agencies that would control entry into the profession or otherwise enjoy monopoly powers in accrediting teacher-education institutions. Any institution that trains teachers should be held accountable for producing students that can demonstrate mastery of the subjects they will teach.

The federal government should offer financial incentives for highly qualified individuals to teach in high-poverty areas. High-poverty schools have a disadvantage when it comes to attracting the best teachers because they are often located in undesirable areas and they often pay less than more affluent areas. Through Americorps and other programs, the federal government can offer loan forgiveness and other incentives to outstanding individuals who teach in disadvantaged schools.

National leaders should insist that all stakeholders are held accountable for student outcomes. The best way to ensure teacher quality is to hold teachers accountable for classroom performance. Administrators should be held accountable for student performance through increased parental choice and student examinations. In exchange, they should have the flexibility of merit pay and renewable contracts in lieu of rigid salary schedules and tenure.

These policy prescriptions are based on the ideal of a performance-based school system. In this policy brief, we hope to show why this approach offers greater promise for improving the teaching profession and should therefore furnish the basis for federal policy.

The Fundamental Choice

How do we attract and retain better teachers? There are fundamentally two approaches. The one that has received the most attention is from the National Commission on Teaching and America's Future (NCTAF), a body whose largest group of members comes from major education organizations and education schools. This approach is designed to solve the teacher quality problem through increased regulation of pre-service training. Proposals along these lines include requiring national accreditation (rather than mere state approval) of teacher education programs; adding new courses, internships, and practica to the preparation prospective teachers receive; and more thoroughly testing teachers before granting them licenses (certificates) to practice. These proposals simply build on the current system's requirements of training and testing before a certificate is awarded. In short, advocates of such measures argue that the way to raise teacher quality is to regulate the teacher labor market more effectively than we have so far.

The alternative, performance-based approach is to deregulate the market for teachers' services, lowering barriers to entering the profession, breaking the monopoly of education schools on the teacher-training market, and expanding the choices for school systems hiring and rewarding faculty.

Weaknesses of the Regulatory Approach: Why Teaching is Not Medicine

The regulatory approach continues the failed policy that American education has been following. The underlying premise is that more of the right kind of training will make graduates of teacher-education programs effective instructors. Proponents claim that we know what this training needs to be. The problem is that the nation has not yet summoned the will to insist that all new teachers receive it.

This view is fundamentally flawed. Faculty in schools of education readily admit that the link between the training prospective teachers receive and their subsequent effectiveness in the classroom remains obscure, despite years of research. Indeed, American education is riven by controversies about what to teach and how it should be taught. Decades of research in schools of education have failed to establish a consensus about even basic pedagogical issues (for example, how to teach young children to read). Curriculum reforms proposed by such bodies as the National Council of Teachers of English have been extremely controversial and have been met with a great deal of resistance from teachers, school boards, and parent associations at the local level. Eminent educators like E.D. Hirsch have written persuasively that much of what passes for progressive pedagogical practice in our schools of education is fundamentally wrong and damaging to children's efforts to learn.

These ongoing disputes, and the sharp criticisms that have been made of pedagogical practices espoused in many leading schools of education, underscore an important difference between teaching and professions like medicine. Advocates of the regulatory approach in education often draw an analogy to medicine when making the case for strict licensing standards based on extensive pre-service training and clinical practice. In medicine, however, both the training doctors receive and the examinations they must pass to obtain a license are based on well- researched medical protocols: the efficacy of medical interventions is determined by careful, controlled study of patient outcomes. This is simply not the case in education, where much research into "teaching effectiveness" continues to rely on assessments by classroom observers whose notions of which behaviors count were themselves shaped in schools of education. Clear superiority of particular pedagogical practices based on objective, measurable outcomes is rarely demonstrated.³

In short, there is little reason to believe that the answer to America's teacher- quality problem is to ask prospective teachers to spend more time in schools of education and to give these schools more money. Education schools have had decades to show they are able to turn out consistently high-quality teachers. They have not done it. Indeed, the ongoing controversies about curriculum and teaching methods are a compelling reason not to grant monopoly powers to a national accrediting agency, as envisioned by such bodies as the NCTAF, a strong advocate of the regulatory approach. Such an agency could actually lower teacher quality over the long term by stifling innovation and preventing competitors with superior ideas from having a chance to demonstrate their merit.⁴

In addition, such reforms may do harm by making it more difficult to become a teacher. More teacher-education programs may require a five-year degree. Programs in some liberal arts colleges may close down if it proves too costly or difficult to secure accreditation from an accrediting body that does not share the college's educational philosophy. By lengthening the period of study and reducing the number of points at which students have access to the system, such changes would deter some from pursuing that career.

Indeed, certification as practiced today already deters too many talented individuals from teaching. Prospective teachers are required to make an up-front investment of a year or more completing college courses and practica before they are licensed. This investment competes with other programs of study for students' time and money. It therefore acts as a deterrent to individuals who are wavering between teaching and other professions, and who wish to keep both options open. It also deters individuals from making mid-career changes, since the cost of returning to school to obtain a license is very high in terms of forgone income.

Despite this reality, proponents of the regulatory approach advocate more pre-service training for teachers. The NCTAF, teachers unions, and schools of education espouse the "professionalization" of the teaching corps, as if no one should enter teaching who is not prepared to spend a lifetime in the classroom. This kind of rhetoric implies that teacher-education programs ought not to be recruiting individuals who are entertaining other career options, but only those with unwavering commitment from the outset.

In fact, many talented people change careers one or more times over their lifetimes. The notion that we need not bother to recruit prospective teachers who are considering other career options is flatly inconsistent with other efforts to improve teacher quality that have been underway for the past decade and a half. For example, those who advocate higher pay for teachers do so in the hope of attracting individuals who are now choosing other professions. It is the very purpose of such policies to draw into education persons who are wavering between career options, for whom the extra salary could tilt the scale. By contrast, erecting entry barriers in the form of certification requirements tends to further drive them out.

"In a society with abundant opportunities for talented college graduates and a tradition of labor market mobility, it will never be possible to persuade two million of them to teach their whole lives. Public rhetoric that implies personal failure when a teacher leaves the classroom after successfully teaching for a number of years may deter many of them from ever setting foot in a classroom."⁵

Breaking the Education-School Monopoly

Instead, federal policy should encourage states to experiment with innovative means of recruiting and training teachers. American education would be improved if there were less, not more, regulation of the teacher labor market. Schools need the opportunity to hire from a broader set of applicants, including instructors who have not fulfilled traditional certification requirements, if they are sufficiently promising in other regards and can demonstrate content mastery of the subjects they intend to teach.

Proponents of strong licensing requirements often react to this statement as if it is tantamount to the claim that anyone can teach. This is absolutely not so. We are not saying that hiring decisions are matters of no importance--far from it. Rather, our claim is that the best way to obtain quality teachers is for a competent administrator familiar with the needs of the school to decide who should teach there, and that in general, the greater the options for teacher training and the broader the applicant pool, the better the opportunity to create and hire good teachers.

The key role played by administrators is a second reason the analogy between teaching and medicine breaks down. The case for medical licensing rests on the premise that consumers are unable to make well-informed decisions about the quality of physician services: there is a complex body of specialized medical knowledge that consumers do not possess. Many consumers, of course, are in a much better position to assess the efficacy of the schooling provided their children. Moreover, they are not asked to do it alone. Parents do not hire teachers--administrators do. When administrators are accountable for student learning--when they must answer for educational outcomes--there is far less reason to restrict the decisions they make regarding educational inputs. The appropriate goal of policy is to make sure administrators know what they are expected to achieve, hold them accountable for those results, and empower them to make the managerial decisions necessary to achieve those ends. This means, among other things, lifting regulations that restrict their choice of teachers to the graduates of education programs. Indeed, if administrators are not free with respect to input decisions, it will prove difficult to hold them truly accountable for outcomes.

Learning by Example: Lessons from Private Schools

We can see this educational model at work in private schools, where administrators as a rule are able to hire uncertified instructors. By most available indicators, private-school faculties are as good as those in the public sector, if not better. A higher proportion attended selective colleges. Fewer went to colleges rated below average ^{see Table 2}. The private sector employs more secondary teachers with an academic major and recruits as many teachers with degrees in mathematics or science (relative to its size). All this despite paying salaries that are, on average, only 60 percent of those earned by public school teachers with comparable levels of education and experience.⁶

What accounts for the ability of private schools to recruit competitively, despite much lower levels of compensation? Certainly it is sometimes due in part to better working conditions (more motivated students, fewer discipline problems, more flexibility). But the freedom to recruit unlicensed teachers also plays a part, as brought out in the two tables below. As Table 1 shows, private schools take significant advantage of the opportunity to employ uncertified instructors. Although most Catholic school teachers are certified, barely half of the teachers in other private schools are. Moreover, these figures actually understate the importance of this flexibility to private-school recruitment, since many schools that prefer their teachers to hold certificates allow them to earn these credentials after they begin working. Thus, many of the teachers represented in this table were first hired without a license--an important distinction, since it meant the license was not a barrier to entry.

Table 1: Teachers Certified in Primary Teaching Field As a Percent of All Teachers(a)
		Public School Teachers				Private School Teachers
						Catholic	Other Religous		Non-Religious
All Teachers		95.9				73.6	50.2		55.9
Elementary		96.7				77.1	51.9		49.2
Secondary		94.8				67.7	46.4		35.1
Combined		96.0				72.2	49.6		62.8
Reproduced from Ballou and Podgursky (1997) a. Source: 1987-88 Schools and Staffing Surveys. Sample restricted to full-time teachers in states which do not require that private teachers be certified. Teachers in Catholic schools who have never been married are dropped from the sample to avoid including members of religious orders.

Table 2 provides more direct evidence on licensing versus other qualifications. Private schools have increased their employment of graduates from selective colleges by recruiting uncertified teachers. This effect is particularly pronounced among teachers who attended the most competitive of these colleges and universities. There is every reason to think that public schools could also benefit from the opportunity to tap this pool of talent.

Of equal importance is the way private schools handle incompetent teachers. With the exception of some unionized Catholic high schools, teacher contracts are written for one year and can be renewed or not as the school chooses. There is no tenure for teachers. While nonrenewals for unsatisfactory performance are not common, they do occur.⁷

Table 2: Percent of Teachers Who Graduated From Selective Colleges and Universities
College Selectivity			Public Schools		Private Religious			Private Non-Religious
					Certified	Not Certified	Total	Certified	Not Certified	Total
Most Competitive			1.0		.9	2.4	1.4	3.4	14.6	7.9
Other Selective			5.4		4.1	5.7	4.6	9.8	15.0	11.9
Total Selective			6.4		5.0	8.1	6.0	13.2	29.6	19.8
Reproduced from Ballou and Podgursky (1997) a. Full-time teachers from Schools and Staffing Survey, 1987-88. Sample excludes teachers in Catholic schools who have never married and may be members of religious orders.

Moreover, layoffs are never based solely on seniority. Rather, private schools seek to retain their most effective teachers. Over time, this can have a substantial effect on the quality of the workforce. For example, in a single year (1990), the contracts of 1.3 percent of private school teachers were not renewed because of budget limitations, declining enrollments, or elimination of courses. If this year is typical, then over a decade some 10 percent of the private school workforce, many of whom have been deemed less effective than their peers, are put through a competitive screening process in which they must prove themselves to alternative employers or leave teaching.

Alternative and Emergency Certification

The suggestion that public schools be allowed to hire teachers who have not gone through a traditional teacher-training program is not a new one. Many states have instituted alternative certification routes to ease the teacher shortage or to facilitate the entry of mid-career professionals into teaching. Although they differ in details, these alternatives typically allow new teachers to complete professional education courses while employed on a provisional basis in a public school system, usually under the guidance of an established, mentor teacher. As a result, few of the costs associated with certification need be incurred until a job is found, and the loss of income is lower.

Alternative certification is a step in the right direction. Unfortunately, most of these programs have been designed in ways that prevent them from playing a large role in teacher recruitment. Many programs are small. Readily identifiable bottlenecks--for example, a limited number of places in mandatory summer workshops- -restrict the number of entrants. Some "alternative certification" programs offer an alternative in name only--new entrants to teaching are expected to complete a master's degree in education in order to obtain their certificate before they begin to teach.⁸

Because alternative certification programs were designed to facilitate mid-career changes, many will not accept individuals who recently graduated from college. This precludes the participation of a younger, more mobile part of the work force. Other programs, created expressly to meet shortages, allow districts to hire alternatively certified teachers only after a declaration that no regularly certified instructor could be found. While this a worthwhile goal, it makes it clear that alternative certification programs are not primarily vehicles for recruiting more capable persons into teaching. As most current alternative certification programs are too small and marginal to have had a substantial impact on teacher recruitment, traditional certification requirements remain a barrier to entry.

Teach for America

Streamlining certification requirements can have a significant impact on the willingness of talented college graduates to spend time as teachers. In 1989, Wendy Kopp proposed the creation of a national teacher corps in her undergraduate senior thesis at Princeton University. Her idea soon became a reality in the program Teach for America (TFA), which successfully recruits highly talented college graduates from the nation's most prestigious universities to teach in urban and rural shortage areas across the United States. The program offers these students an intensive training institute and assists them in wading through the bureaucracy of provisional and emergency credentialing.

For 1995-1996, the TFA corps included graduates of over 240 universities, including large numbers from Harvard, Yale, Cornell, Duke, Northwestern, Stanford, and UC-Berkeley. The average undergraduate GPA was 3.25 and the average SAT score was 1205. Thirteen percent were math and science majors and 37 percent were members of minority groups.

There are no data comparing the students of TFA teachers to other students, but a 1996 independent study by Kane, Parsons and Associates showed high satisfaction with the program among principals, parents, and students. Over 75 percent of principals responded that corps members were better than other beginning teachers overall, and 89 percent of principals rated the intellectual ability of TFA teachers higher than other teachers. Almost three quarters of parents reported that corps members were more effective than other teachers, and 78 percent of students said that corps members knew their subject matter better than other teachers.

The vast majority of TFA teachers finish their first year, and almost 90 percent complete a second year. Although TFA intentionally recruits non-education majors, a significant percentage of corps members continue teaching after their two-year commitment. Others go on to medicine, law, business, or other careers as planned, and remain active in their community schools.

Empowering Administrators and Enhancing Accountability

Public school administrators must face appropriate incentives and sanctions to ensure that staffing decisions (indeed, all decisions) are made in the best interests of the public. They need to be held accountable for school performance. Generally speaking, there are two ways this can be achieved. In the private sector (and in charter schools), schools that fail to perform satisfactorily are disciplined by the market, as parents exercise their right to choose another school. Strengthening parental choice is one way to enhance accountability within public education, too, but it is not the only one. There is also a growing movement to hold schools accountable through the use of curriculum-based examinations and minimum competency tests for students. Whether by one means or the other, these measures to enhance administrative accountability need to be accompanied by more freedom and authority to hire good teachers from a broader range of backgrounds. As in the private sector, administrators who are responsible for outcomes in their schools must be empowered to make personnel decisions without undue constraints.

There are some legitimate concerns, however, that wider managerial authority might be abused. Proponents of strict licensing standards point to nepotism, political patronage, administrative incompetence, laziness, and bureaucratic red-tape as factors that lead to poor hiring decisions. But the best way to meet these concerns is not to erect barriers that discourage talented people from entering the profession, nor is it to limit districts' choice of teachers to graduates of teacher education programs. Indeed, the notion that teacher licensing is an appropriate way to deal with poor administration is rather extraordinary. Licensing does nothing to rid school systems of these administrators; it simply boxes them in with respect to hiring decisions. But experience has shown that this is not enough to prevent them from exercising poor judgment in personnel matters (among other things).

Obviously, poor administrators need to be removed. Enhancing accountability is a means to this end. But it is also clear that mechanisms for removing poor principals and superintendents are imperfect, and that there will remain some role for state regulation to protect the public from the worst abuses of incompetent or corrupt administration. This role should be a limited one, aimed at screening out incompetent teachers rather than putting obstacles in the way of promising ones. The best way to reach this objective would be to test teachers for basic skills and knowledge of the subjects they teach.

Finally, districts should create performance-based systems to reward outstanding classroom teachers with special distinctions and extra pay.

Endnotes

(1)Only 16 percent of education majors had college board scores in the top quartile of 1992-93 graduates; by contrast, the corresponding figure for humanities majors was 33 percent. Education majors were over represented in the bottom quartile, at 30 percent. See: Henke, et al., Out of the Lecture Hall and Into the Classroom: 1992-93 College Graduates and Elementary/Secondary School Teaching, (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education, 1996).

(2)The criteria for demonstrating subject matter knowledge will necessarily differ for secondary school teachers, who concentrate on one or two subjects, and elementary school teachers, who teach all subjects. While secondary school teachers should be tested for depth of a particular subject, elementary school teachers should be tested for basic skills in several areas, especially English and math.

(3)The much-touted Praxis examinations developed by the Educational Testing Service (ETS) show how far we have to go in this respect. The Praxis I test, given to beginning teachers, was validated by soliciting the opinions of teachers, education school faculty, and other education professionals in focus groups. These groups were asked what proportion of "minimally qualified" teachers would be able to answer a particular test item correctly. No studies were undertaken to correlate scores on the Praxis with student learning or, indeed, any other measures of teaching performance. According to one ETS official, opposition of teacher unions figured among the reasons for this decision. See: Dale Ballou and Michael Podgursky. Teacher Pay and Teacher Quality, (Kalamazoo, MI: W.E. Upjohn Institute, 1997).

(4)The risks in granting monopoly powers to private licensing and accrediting agencies are still more evident when one considers the relationship between such agencies and teacher unions. For example, the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) are closely associated with the principal agency for accrediting teacher-education programs, the National Council on Accreditation of Teacher Education. Union officials occupy seven of the 31 seats on the council's board. The unions provide financial support to the council and select teachers for on-site visits. Their interest in restricting teacher supply is so obvious that it is astonishing that anyone would contemplate giving such an organization the authority to shut down teacher-education programs. Indeed, controlling entry into the profession has long been a stated aim of the NEA.

(5)Richard J. Murnane, et al. Who Will Teach? Policies that Matter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991).

(6)The salary gap is still more pronounced when taking into account fringe benefits, which are quite generous in the public sector.

(7)Dale Ballou and Michael Podgursky. Teacher Pay and Teacher Quality. Virtually all of the school heads interviewed by Ballou and Podgursky indicated that they had dismissed an ineffective teacher on at least one occasion.

(8)Not surprisingly, it is this kind of "alternative" that is favored by proponents of the regulatory approach, who are opposed to genuine alternatives that lower entry barriers to promising individuals.

Dale Ballou is an associate professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts. For the past eight years, he has been engaged in research into teacher labor markets. He is the co-author, with Michael Podgursky of the University of Missouri, of "Teacher Pay and Teacher Quality" (W.E. Upjohn Institute, 1997). Stephanie Soler is the education policy analyst at the Progressive Policy Institute.