This article explores the relationship between school contextual factors and teacher retention decisions in New York City. The methodological approach separates the effects of teacher characteristics from school characteristics by modeling the relationship between the assessments of school contextual factors by one set of teachers and the turnover decisions by other teachers in the same school. We find that teachers' perceptions of the school administration have by far the greatest influence on teacher retention decisions. This effect of administration is consistent for first-year teachers and the full sample of teachers and is confirmed by a survey of teachers who have recently left teaching.

For well over a decade school districts across the United States have struggled to recruit and retain effective mathematics teachers. In response to the need for qualified math teachers and the difficulty of directly recruiting individuals who have already completed the math content required for qualification, some districts, including Baltimore, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., and New York City, have developed alternative certification programs with a math immersion component to recruit otherwise well-qualified candidates who do not have undergraduate majors in math. This article examines the qualifications, student achievement gains, and retention of Math Immersion teachers in New York City compared to New York City mathematics teachers who began their careers through other pathways.

The report summarizes the work of eleven scholars. It both describes the problems with state school finance systems and offers solutions. "Funding student learning requires more than merely adjusting funding levels, tinkering with distribution formulas, creating new programs, imposing another sanction, or singling out hot-button issues," Adams says. "The system itself must be transformed so that resources can better support the ambitious learning goals the public now demands."

We developed a zero-to-five index of the strength of accountability in 50 states based on the use of high-stakes testing to sanction and reward schools, and analyzed whether that index is related to student gains on the NAEP mathematics test in 1996-2000. The study also relates the index to changes in student retention in the 9th grade and to changes in high school completion rates over the same period. The results show that students in high-accountability states averaged significantly greater gains on the NAEP 8th-grade math test than students in states with little or no state measures to improve student performance. Furthermore, students in high-accountability states do not have significantly higher retention or lower high school completion rates.

Over 55 million children and adolescents attend elementary and secondary schools in the United States, 89 percent in public schools. These students spend approximately 1000 hours each year in schools across the country, for which local, state, and federal governments spend over $550 billion (National Center for Education Statistics [NCES] 2008). Education is an intensive and costly enterprise. It also has the potential to dramatically improve opportunities for students. In the United States, estimates of the return to an additional year of schooling are in the neighborhood of 10 percent, depending on the data and method (Card 1999). Educational attainment is also associated with differences in individual health, incarceration, and dependence on public assistance (Belfield and Levin 2007). While schooling improves children's lifetime opportunities, the debate on how to use scarce time and resources to maximize outcomes while in school is not settled.

A large literature demonstrates the direct and indirect influence of health on socioeconomic attainment, and reveals the ways in which health and socioeconomic background simultaneously and dynamically affect opportunities for attainment and mobility. Despite an increasing understanding of the effects of health on social processes, research to date remains limited in its conceptualization and measurement of the temporal dimensions of health, especially in the presence of socioeconomic circumstances that covary with health over time. Guided by life course theory, we use data from the British National Child Development Study, an ongoing panel study of a cohort born in 1958, to examine the association between lifetime health trajectories and socioeconomic attainment in middle age. We apply finite mixture modeling to identify distinct trajectories of health that simultaneously account for timing, duration and stability. Moreover, we employ propensity score weighting models to account for the presence of time-varying socioeconomic factors in estimating the impact of health trajectories. We find that, when poor health is limited to the childhood years, the disadvantage in socioeconomic attainment relative to being continuously healthy is either insignificant or largely explained by time-varying socioeconomic confounders. The socioeconomic impact of continuously deteriorating health over the life course is more persistent, however. Our results suggest that accounting for the timing, duration and stability of poor health throughout both childhood and adulthood is important for understanding how health works to produce social stratification. In addition, the findings highlight the importance of distinguishing between confounding and mediating effects of time-varying socioeconomic circumstances.

Over the past 20 years, alternative certification for teachers has emerged as a major avenue of teacher preparation. The proliferation of new pathways has spurred heated debate over how best to recruit, prepare, and support qualified teachers. Drawing on the work of leading scholars, Alternative Routes to Teaching provides a thorough and dispassionate review of the research evidence on alternative certification. It takes readers beyond the simple dichotomies that have characterized the debate over alternative certification, encourages them to look carefully at the trade-offs implicit in any route into teaching, and suggests ways to marry the proven strengths of both traditional and alternative approaches.

This article uses the supply and demand model as a framework for understanding the factors underlying the recruitment and retention of teachers. Teachers' choices and their related preferences affect the supply of teachers and the actions of schools and districts affect the demand for teachers. The supply and demand for teachers come together to create the composition of the current teacher workforce. The article concludes by highlighting common policy approaches to advancing recruitment and retention goals in schools and districts and summarizes the current research, estimating the effectiveness of these policies.

The mission of the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS) is to establish "high and rigorous standards for what teachers should know and be able to do, to certify teachers who meet those standards, and to advance other education reforms for the purpose of improving student learning in American schools." In response to a request from the U.S. Congress, the National Research Council developed a framework for evaluating programs that award advanced-level teacher certification and applied that framework in an evaluation of the impacts of the NBPTS. Specifically, this book addresses the impacts on students, teachers, and the educational system in this country. Assessing Accomplished Teaching finds that teachers who earn board certification are more effective at improving their students' achievement than other teachers, but school systems vary greatly in the extent to which they recognize and make use of board-certified teachers. Many of the questions on the evaluation framework could not be answered because the data have not been collected, and the report makes recommendations for the kinds of research that are needed to fully evaluate the impacts of board certification by the NBPTS.

Despite heightened policy interest in improving the quality of the early childhood care and education (ECCE) workforce, very little is known about the characteristics of this workforce or the extent to which these characteristics have changed over time. Using nationally-representative data, this paper fills this gap by documenting changes between 1990-2010 in the educational attainment, compensation and turnover of the ECCE workforce overall and within each of the three sectors that compose it: centers, homes and schools. We find that average educational attainment and compensation of ECCE workers, as well as the prestige of those entering the workforce, increased substantially over the period studied, and that turnover decreased. We also document a major shift in the composition of the ECCE workforce towards center-based settings and away from home-based settings. Although this shift towards more regulated settings provides one plausible explanation for the overall improvements, we actually find that the improvements in the characteristics of the ECCE workforce were primarily driven by changes within each of the sectors rather than by the shift away from home-based settings towards centers. Further, we show that the home-based workforce exhibited the most profound changes over the period examined.