The Center for Teaching Quality seeks to improve student learning and advance the teaching profession by cultivating teacher leadership, conducting timely research, and crafting smart policy — all in an effort to ensure that every student in America has a qualified, well-supported and effective teacher.

Since 1999, CTQ’s work – rooted in the National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future (1996) landmark report What Matters Most – has sought to promote a coherent system of teacher recruitment, preparation, induction, professional development, compensation and leadership that can dramatically close the nation’s student achievement gap.

While progress has been made on the teaching policy front, much more remains to be accomplished. Our nation’s highest-needs schools are still more likely to be staffed by less experienced and least qualified teachers. What’s more, nearly a decade into the 21st century, much of America’s teacher development apparatus continues to operate on the assumption that talented, well-educated females are a captive labor pool willing to work for below-market wages. School district recruitment and hiring practices rest on mid-20th century organizational assumptions about teaching and learning, and they are still concocted around the career mobility patterns of now-retiring Baby Boomers — not the career aspirations of upcoming generations. Most universities, while attracting more academically able candidates than in the past, still do not prepare teachers for teaching in our most challenging schools. Alternative certification programs often do not attract the most promising non-traditional recruits (as many policymakers assume), and their truncated preparation regimes result in even more teachers who enter classrooms unprepared to meet the needs of our most challenged students.

As a small non-profit with big ideas, we are eager to promote a true teaching profession — one designed to serve students, families, and communities. CTQ’s research studies and policy development initiatives are designed to help close the teaching quality gap. We also are spreading the expertise and elevating the voices of accomplished teachers so that their knowledge of students and schools can inform the next evolution of teaching policies and practices.

The New Millennium Initiative is a major leap in CTQ’s evolutionary journey. Launched in the fall of 2009, and supported by local and national partners, the Initiative is engaging young teachers in selected communities across the United States and connecting them to researchers, reformers, administrators and union leaders in an effort to grow and project their voices on matters of teaching policy and expert teaching practice. As they begin to market their ideas to policymakers, fellow teachers, and members of their local communities, they will also develop their knowledge, skills and relationships to become the next generation of teacher leaders.

Everything that needs to be done to ensure a quality teacher (and teaching quality) for every student is being done somewhere in the world today. Unfortunately, there is no venue in the United States where all the pieces of the teacher development/human capital system are coherently sewn together. CTQ is committed to spreading the technical know-how — and building the political will — to make that happen.

We invite you to explore this site to discover more about our current initiatives, our team, and the organizations whose generous support makes our work possible.