New teacher distribution methods hold promise
By Stephen Sawchuk/Education Week
With effective teaching a top policy priority, certain school districts, the federal government, and nonprofit groups are renewing efforts to pilot and study strategies for pairing effective teachers with students in low-performing, high-poverty schools. The results could offer clues about how to rectify an imbalance in the distribution of the best teachers within districts—a requirement of both the Elementary and Secondary Education Act and the 2009 economic-stimulus law, and one of K-12 education’s most intractable problems. The initiatives differ from earlier attempts to equalize teacher talent by using more sophisticated techniques to identify and target top teachers, including the use of value-added data. (more...)