NEW YORK, Nov. 21 (UPI) -- A study by the Hoover Institution of teachers in New York found that teacher certification makes little difference in student achievement.
The findings are important because of the emphasis in the No Child Left Behind Act on teacher qualifications.
The report found effective and ineffective teachers in both groups and said that high-performing teachers do improve achievement as measured on test scores. Thomas J. Kane or Harvard University, Jonah E. Rockoff of Columbia Business School, and Douglas O. Staiger of Dartmouth College, the authors, recommend that school districts develop ways to measure teachers' effectiveness with students.
"By shifting the focus away from 'qualifications,' we are not proposing to open the floodgates into teaching," they said. "Instead, we simply want to move the dam further downstream from the time of initial recruitment and postpone assessments of teacher's effectiveness for a year or two until districts have much more useful information about which teachers are performing well and which are performing poorly."
The study was published in the journal Education Next.
