Among the report's findings:

> Miami's procedures for hiring and assigning teachers to schools do not give sufficient consideration to school needs, placing a large burden on principals to screen applicants and not recruiting a competitive enough applicant pool. Most problematic however is that, principals do not have final say over who works in their buildings. > While Miami has made some progress at designing a system to reward its best teachers, it is dismissing far too few poor performing teachers. Given that its teacher workforce is over 20,000 teachers, its dismissal rate suggests that teachers are not being held accountable for their performance. In 2010-2011 no more than 10 teachers (less than 0.05 percent) were dismissed for poor performance; an additional six who were dismissed appealed the evaluation procedures and were reinstated. This is the lowest rate of dismissal NCTQ has seen in the districts it has studied. > The district is not adequately supporting future teacher leaders in the district by routinely laying off its newest teachers while protecting tenured teachers without any consideration of job performance and, also, reserving almost all raises that a teacher can receive (70 percent) for those who have been teaching at least 20 years. > The evaluation system, in spite of several state mandates, remains in need of much work. Miami-Dade teachers want more feedback about their instruction, particularly from content experts, a need that the peer review program that the district has in place has not been able to fully meet. The current instrument used to evaluate teachers does not sufficiently capture what high quality instruction should look like. > District record keeping, often a struggle for many urban districts, appears to be a particular problem in Miami-Dade. For example, there is a lot of routine data that it does not collect such as how many teachers are struggling or what is the breakdown of teacher ratings on the annual evaluation instrument. > There is little indication that the district looks for individuals with strong academic backgrounds when recruiting new teachers, even though research has found that teachers with a strong academic background of their own are more likely to be effective.

6 big findings 6 big findings (Spanish) Read the full report Read the executive summary Read the press release Read the press release (Spanish) Press Coverage The Miami Times story 02/15/12 New America Media Op Ed 02/15/12 Associated Press story 01/19/12 Miami Herald story 01/19/12 NPR story 01/19/12