What We're Doing

The Center for Teaching Quality (CTQ) continues to work with several states and school districts across the nation to assess and improve their teaching and learning conditions. These reform efforts are allowing individual districts and schools to understand and improve the conditions under which teachers work and ultimately decrease teacher turnover and increase student achievement.

To study teaching and learning conditions, CTQ surveys those whose opinion matters most on these issues — teachers themselves. Teachers are asked questions about time, facilities and resources, empowerment, leadership and professional development – with some of these factors appearing to have a relationship to whether teachers stay in schools and, most importantly, whether students learn. CTQ is undertaking a serious review of its instruments and analyses. Click here to learn more about the current survey instrument.

A statistical analysis is conducted using these survey results, along with other outcome data sources (student achievement as indicated by AYP and state school improvement measures, school size, teacher turnover, percent minority students, and percent of students on free and reduced lunch). In 2007, CTQ greatly improved its tools and measures – but this important issue deserves further review and refinement.

New Tools to Assess Teaching and Learning Conditions. The Center for Teaching Quality is proud to announce that the Spencer Foundation awarded us a grant to assess more carefully the instruments and analyses previously employed to understand the effects of teaching and learning conditions on teacher retention and student achievement. Drawing on some of the nation’s best scholars, CTQ will publish a white paper in late Spring 2008 addressing key methodological issues such as non-response bias, variable specification and construct validity as well as more reliable scales and more robust outcome measures. The researchers engaged in this work have backgrounds in political science, labor economics, sociology, and education. The Spencer white paper will also focus on how to build a national agenda on better understanding teaching and learning conditions as they relate to recruiting and retaining "highly qualified" teachers, school improvement, and student achievement.

CTQ developed the Teacher Working Conditions Toolkit to help communities and schools better understand and respond to the data from the Teacher Working Conditions Surveys. The Toolkit helps users identify effective strategies for achieving school reform. Its many resources include examples of schools that have addressed teacher working conditions successfully, checklists and concrete ideas to provide a roadmap for activity on working condition reforms, and background research to give users some theoretical perspective in identifying school reform strategies. The tool is organized for the needs of various role groups including community members, teachers, principals, district officials and policymakers.

Read about Where We Are and What We've Learned.