Resources

The Connecticut Teacher Education and Mentoring (TEAM) Program provides differentiated support to beginning teachers based on their individual contexts and needs. It is a collaboration between the state department of education, institutes of higher education, and regional education service centers. The TEAM induction and mentoring program is designed to help teachers transition into the classroom, develop a common language about effective teaching, and provide professional growth opportunities for new teachers based on an action research project.

This Ask the Team brief from the Center on Great Teachers and Leaders examines different state methods for ensuring equivalency between district evaluation systems. For the purposes of comparing data for discussions of inequitable access to great teachers and leaders, ensuring state equivalency in system development is of key importance. 

This brief describes the prevalence of the highest performing teachers in 10 purposely selected districts across seven states. The patterns suggest that students from low-income families have unequal access, on average, to the district’s highest performing teachers at the middle school level but not at the elementary level. The data also indicate that there is variation in the types of inequitable access: Some districts have an underrepresentation of the highest performing teachers in high-poverty elementary and middle schools.

During this interactive session, presenters discussed the use of performance data to support equitable access to great teachers from different perspectives. Researchers described the efforts that districts across the United States are making to address equity gaps in using performance measures, along with the challenges and the opportunities of using value-added models to examine access to great teachers. State-level policies and practices to support this work also were discussed, with Georgia as an example.

Access to important educational resources in California’s middle and high schools is not equal among schools that serve different student populations. Overall, the most disadvantaged populations of middle and high school students are likely to have the least access to the resources necessary for learning.

New York rural schools and districts have a high percentage of core teaching assignments filled by highly qualified teachers; there are only small differences across key factors such as poverty and the need for school improvement. Urban schools—particularly those in New York City—have fewer core assignments filled by highly qualified teachers.

As part of their 2006 equity plan, state education agency personnel in Delaware sought to conduct an in-depth analysis to understand the reasons behind the teacher access patterns in the state. Staff from the National Comprehensive Center for Teacher Quality supported the development of research-based protocols for this analysis. A webcast presentation describing the work and options for regional centers is available.

This report from The Education Trust recommends policy changes that districts and states can consider to address issues of school culture, and how these issues relate to rates of teacher dissatisfaction and turnover in schools that serve students from low-income and minority families.

Ensuring safer schools requires establishing effective indicators of the current state of school crime and safety across the United States and regularly updating and monitoring these indicators. This report presents the most recent data available on school crime and student safety, including topics such as victimization, teacher injury, bullying, school conditions, fights, weapons, the availability and student use of drugs and alcohol, and student perceptions of personal safety at school. Indicators of crime and safety are compared across different population subgroups and long term.

This resource provides information to help schools engage families and communities in education.