As in other highly skilled careers, licensure requirements were put in place to ensure that candidates that enter the teaching profession are competent and effective. Unfortunately, licensure requirements can change from year to year and vary depending on the subject area in which a candidate plans to teach, making the pathway to obtaining full…

Employing data from a stratified random survey of newly certified teachers in Texas, we compare the mathematical content preparation of traditional teacher program graduates with graduates of alternative programs. We find that graduates of traditional programs have statistically significantly higher content preparation even when taking precollege…

Programs that prepare elementary teachers have a daunting responsibility -- they are readying the people who will teach children reading and numeracy, build a foundation in STEM and social studies subjects, all while providing many children's first introduction to formal schooling. By rising to this challenge, programs may also help a more diverse…

The quality of the teacher workforce in the United States is of considerable concern to education stakeholders and policymakers. Numerous studies show that student academic success depends in no small part on access to high-quality teachers. Many pundits point to the fact that in the United States, teachers tend not to be drawn from the top of the…

Most studies that have fueled alarm over the attrition and mobility rates of high-quality teachers have relied on proxy indicators of teacher quality, which recent research finds to be only weakly correlated with value-added measures of teachers' performance. We examine attrition and mobility of teachers using teacher value-added measures for…