According to the editors of Education Week‘s Quality Counts 2006 report, the standards movement in education has generated numerous efforts to assure greater teacher quality over the past 10 years. Those include changes in teacher-education and licensure requirements, new subject-knowledge expectations, incentives for professional development, and evaluations of student performance. Yet a great deal of debate—and even frustration—remains over what exactly makes an effective teacher and how teacher quality can be measured?
What’s your view? What are the attributes of effective teachers? How best can strong teaching be fostered on a broad scale? If you were a politician, what sort of teacher-quality measures would you propose?