Research & Insights

State education policymakers must feel like Sisyphus—ever heaving against the boulder of teacher shortages; rarely, if ever, making meaningful progress. But with strong alternative certification policies, filling teacher vacancies does not have to be an eternal struggle.

We have an obligation to ensure elementary teachers have the knowledge and skills to be ready to help their students succeed. A straightforward stopgap? Strong elementary math licensure tests.

After more than five decades of scientific research, we know what works and what doesn’t when it comes to how to teach kids to read. Yet only a quarter of teacher prep programs cover the science of reading.

New research shows that student teaching placements do more than build skills—they shape where teachers work and what students they work with.

Here’s how large school districts are addressing special education teacher attrition with incentives and other strategies to ease workloads.

Strong math skills open doors to higher earnings, college opportunities, and the fastest-growing careers. If we want students to succeed, we need to better prepare and support our elementary teachers in math instruction. Here’s how!

Despite raises in teacher salaries across the country, skyrocketing rental and mortgage costs are outpacing teacher salary increases. This isn’t just bad for teachers. It’s bad for everybody.

New research finds special education teachers switch schools 3+ times in their careers, more than core subject teachers. What drives these moves? We break down the key findings and highlight some questions districts need to answer to improve retention.

Identifying new teacher pipelines is a priority for districts striving to build a stable, effective workforce. While many have focused on recruiting paraprofessionals into teaching, districts have largely overlooked substitute teachers—a longstanding and substantial presence in schools—as a source of future educators.

A new NCTQ analysis finds that despite salary increases since 2019, teachers are falling further behind in the race for housing affordability.

Teachers with master’s degrees almost always get paid more than teachers without. But elementary math teachers who go through graduate-level teacher prep are often less prepared than teachers who go through an undergraduate program.

Can AI truly support teachers in ways that improve teacher effectiveness? Here’s what the research says.

Math skills are critical for students’ success in other subjects and later in life, yet far too many teacher prep programs fail to give aspiring teachers the essential knowledge they need to be effective math teachers—undermining student learning before the first lesson even begins.

The more teachers stay, the less districts need to hire and train new ones. While good working conditions play a role, new research confirms that compensation also matters—especially for certain positions.

New research examines what tools school hiring managers can use when hiring teachers and concludes that, when used well, they can help hire better teachers—but they’re not always used.

This brief outlines key findings regarding state teacher data systems and provides recommendations for enhancing them.

Teachers’ time is one of our most precious resources in schools. To design policies that make the best use of time to support teacher effectiveness, it’s helpful to see how school districts allocate it and how that compares across the country.

Parents in Massachusetts are stirring up “some good trouble” by suing the authors and publishing companies who “peddled a raft of products and curricula that sought to diminish and even exclude systematic and daily phonics instruction.”

As the field of neuroscience advances, so does our understanding of what works in teaching and learning. The best recent example of this? The reading movement. Our knowledge of how children’s brains learn to read has increased, and it has led to a revolution in how to teach children to read.

Mid-career professionals who transition into teaching bring years of career experience, a sense of purpose, and—according to recent research—a stronger likelihood of actually stepping into the classroom than their less experienced counterparts.

Teacher evaluation systems—if implemented well—can help districts make better workforce decisions. We examine whether large districts’ policies align with the research on what will likely make for effective and impactful evaluation systems.

Nationally, the diversification of the teacher workforce is slowing compared to the diversification of college-educated adults, but California, Texas, and Washington, D.C. are bucking that trend. Explore what factors contribute to their relatively high rates of teacher diversity and how their policies and practices will likely affect teacher quality.

New research reveals that the share of well-prepared STEM teachers in high-need schools has been increasing over the last 15 years, though high-need schools still have a smaller share of these teachers than more affluent schools. 

How targeted professional development in math and science can significantly boost student achievement—and which strategies truly make the difference.