Improving teacher quality: lessons from America's No Child Left Behind

Abstract

How developed countries train, recruit and retain their schoolteachers is an area of considerable interest in education today. In this paper we consider how the US is addressing the issue of teacher quality by holding schools and school districts accountable for ensuring that all teachers of core subjects are ‘highly qualified’ by the end of the 2005–2006 school year. Part of the hugely important No Child Left Behind Act, this ‘highly qualified’ teacher requirement links billions of dollars of Federal funding to ensuring that schools and school districts develop strategies to meet these targets. We consider how successful this policy has been in two case study states: Wisconsin and California. What emerges is a mandate for change which emphasizes teachers' content knowledge over pedagogic skills, which reveals discrepancies in the certification, training and administration of the profession across different states, and which sharply reminds us of the difficulties faced by even the apparently simple policy of requiring high quality teachers by law.