The Center for Teaching Quality spent years studying teacher working conditions (TWC) across the nation, surveying more than 200,000 educators in an effort to identify factors that best promote effective teaching and learning. We found some links between teaching conditions and student achievement but also discovered that the limitations of current instruments (that define working conditions too narrowly) and data (that do not distinguish between different types of retention) suggest caution must be used in making specific causal claims. With support from the Spencer Foundation we began to dig deeper and published an important white paper. We found that questions most often posed in TWC surveys do not distinguish between what matters in high needs schools.

With the recent generous support of the Ford Foundation, we have refined survey instruments for educators about school conditions, and conducted intensive longitudinal case studies of high-needs schools in three urban districts. This research has underscored the importance of teacher collaboration, systems of distributed leadership in schools, administrators’ ability to make strategic staffing and resource decisions independently of district offices, connections between classrooms and extended day or summer programs, and extended clinical preparation for educators – all of which matter greatly to teaching effectiveness and retention of the best teachers.

Our Ford-funded efforts also included the development of another TeacherSolutions report on Transforming School Conditions – crafted by a team of accomplished teachers from urban districts around the country – who draw on empirical evidence and their wealth of teaching experiences to point out the conditions that are needed for teachers to teach all students effectively.