Models and measures of beginning teacher quality.

Teacher quality is widely recognized as influencing student achievement and success in school. In this article, we consider various approaches to the assessment of teacher quality, including process-product observational measures, evaluation checklists, professional standards, large-scale surveys, and commercially available observation systems. We present examples of each from the special education literature, consider teacher education research genres for which each is appropriate, and evaluate each using a set of criteria that incorporates both practical and technical considerations. We advocate for multimethod approaches to teacher quality research and for more research relating what teachers know and do to what students learn, and we note that a stronger link between teachers and learners would allow for more rigorous evaluations of teacher preparation.

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Drawing on analyses of a subset of teacher quality studies in which student outcomes were used as a dependent variable (Hess, 2001; Walsh, 2001), the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB; 2001) challenged traditional concepts of good teaching by emphasizing content mastery and verbal ability and downplaying the importance of pedagogy. In turn, the belief that pedagogy is a less powerful determinant of student achievement than content mastery has led policymakers to propose alternatives to traditional teacher preparation. Thus, the NCLB encourages states to develop routes that move teachers into classrooms on "a fast-track basis" and includes in its definition of "highly qualified teachers" individuals enrolled in such alternative routes. The NCLB draws no distinction between secondary and elementary teachers, or between general and special education teachers, in spite of the fact that content mastery would seem to have relatively less relevance to the effectiveness of elementary and special education teachers and that pedagogy would have relatively more. Arguably, for most special educators, pedagogy would seem far more important as a determinant of achievement than mastery of the content they teach, which often involves basic skills.

Special education alternative routes are proliferating (Rosenberg & Sindelar, 2005), most probably in response to chronic shortages of special education teachers and the NCLB requirement that all teachers be highly qualified by the 2006-2007 school year. Furthermore, in a recent national survey of special education alternative programs, Rosenberg, Boyer, Sindelar, and Misra (in press) identified a small subset that has adopted NCLB-like, fast-track approaches as well. In programs of this sort, participants are provided limited training, in spite of their need for strategies for coping with significant learning and behavior problems. Widespread development of alternative routes and the existence of even these few fast-track alternatives led Rosenberg et al. to conjecture that special education has entered an era in which traditional standards for teacher preparation have given way to pragmatism. It is important to note that this transition has occurred in spite of limited empirical research on the efficacy of preparation alternatives, including traditional routes, and the equivocal findings that existing research has yielded (Nougaret, Scruggs, & Mastropieri, 2005; Sindelar, Daunic, & Rennells, 2004).

Thus, from teacher educators' perspective, research on the efficacy of alternative preparation routes seems more critical than ever before. For one thing, a policy direction is set, and its disregard for pedagogical training undermines what teacher educators believe about the scope and rigor of effective preparation. Policymakers also have raised the standard for credible evidence, so that changes to NCLB policy on teacher preparation and teacher quality will require not only more evidence but better evidence as well. Besides, to compete successfully for students in the entrepreneurial world in which teacher educators now work, guidance in designing effective alternative routes is essential. However urgent these considerations may be, rigorous and definitive research on the impact of teacher preparation cannot be easily--or cheaply--had. Perhaps the first and most important hurdle for teacher education researchers to surmount is to identify a credible and versatile measure of teacher quality, one that will garner the attention of both policymakers, who have set student outcomes as the gold standard for teacher quality, and teacher educators, who understand the difficulty of linking what they do first to the competence of their graduates and ultimately to the achievement of their graduates' students.

We recognize and appreciate the importance of linking what teachers do to what their students learn and how well they behave. Establishing links would allow teacher education researchers the opportunity to focus more specifically on linking the content of preparation to the competence of graduates. Measures of competence or quality (terms we use interchangeably in this paper) have not been used commonly in research on teacher preparation, in spite of the fact that concepts of teacher quality have evolved through an interesting series of representations.

Concepts of Teacher Quality