The No Child Left Behind Act, enacted in 2002, aimed to improve learning and eliminate achievement gaps by raising accountability in schools. The new requirements also generated volumes of valuable long-term data on students and teachers—data that are now grounding and guiding education policy and allowing researchers to answer long-held questions about what leads to student success.
To comb through these data, the Urban Institute launched the National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research (CALDER) with scholars at six universities. Emerging findings are beginning to influence policy. For example, while it is common knowledge that teachers influence student achievement, only recently have researchers been able to measure that effect.
Effective teachers, CALDER researchers found, get about three times the student achievement gains that weak teachers get. This means that, in one school year, students get about one and a half years worth of learning from the best teachers and only about half a year with less effective teachers.
Successful teachers are unevenly distributed across districts, schools, and classrooms. Teachers with the weakest credentials and least experience often work in schools with the highest concentrations of low-income, low-performing, and minority students.
What makes a teacher effective, though, appears to upend conventional wisdom. While seniority and advanced degrees largely determine teacher compensation, research is showing that these qualifications do not guarantee effective teachers. Additional years of experience, beyond the first three to five years of teaching, do not appear to improve student performance. Neither do advanced degrees unless educators are studying the subject matter they teach.
The best teachers have strong academic backgrounds, such as subject-matter expertise and high scores on teacher-licensing exams. Also, evidence suggests, alternative paths into a teaching career, such as Teach for America, produce more effective teachers. These instructors have less teaching experience, but generally have higher academic qualifications and know more about the subjects they teach.
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The Urban Institute disseminates many education publications.
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