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Teacher quality is now the focus of unprecedented policy analysis. To achieve its goals, the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) requires a “highly qualified teacher” in all classrooms. The concern with teacher quality has been driven by a growing recognition, fueled by accumulating research evidence, of how critical teachers are to student learning. To acquire and retain high-quality teachers in our Nation’s classrooms will require substantial policy change at many levels. There exists...

This study focuses on the socio-cultural and institutional factors that affect female teacher deployment in rural primary schools in Nigeria. In Kwara State, there are extreme imbalances in teacher distribution between rural and urban areas due to female teachers’ active avoidance and/or attrition from rural posts. Given these problems, this article discusses an innovative use of the Capability Approach that informed a rural teacher deployment policy that addressed a number of issues that...

A spatial decision support system based on geo-informatics and spatial modelling tools has been used to provide a reorganization plan of school networks, The study was undertaken in collaboration with the Ministry of Education and Research of Estonia

June 30, 2006 was the deadline under the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act for ensuring “...that poor and minority children were not taught at higher rates than other children by inexperienced, unqualified, or out-of-field teachers...” In the weeks after the deadline, the US Department of Education informed state departments of education that while no extension had been declared, states can still be in good standing if they show a “good faith” effort. Though states bear this responsibility,...

In the current review, we examined teacher leadership research completed since York-Barr and Duke published the seminal review on teacher leadership in 2004. The review was undertaken to examine how teacher leadership is defined, how teacher leaders are prepared, their impact, and those factors that facilitate or inhibit teacher leaders’ work. Beyond this, the review considered theories informing teacher leadership, teacher leadership within disciplinary contexts, and the roles of teacher...

Teaching is an emotional endeavor. Unlike mass service employees, teachers enjoy considerable autonomy in their teaching and maintain relatively stable relationships with students, parents, and colleagues. This study is a meta-analytic review of the associations between teachers' emotional labor strategies (i.e., surface acting, deep acting, and the expression of naturally felt emotions) and other relevant constructs. The meta-analysis is based on 85 empirical articles and 86 independent...

Indonesia faces serious problems in the number, cost, quality and distribution of teachers. In recent years, its central government has introduced a range of reforms to address these problems but they have produced modest results. This paper suggests that this outcome reflects the way in which predatory political and bureaucratic elites have used the school system for decades to accumulate resources, distribute patronage, mobilize political support, and exercise political control rather than...

In this study the authors have looked at the impact of school mapping in the development of education in Tanzania. The study examined the experiences of six districts where school mapping exercises were carried out. The key question that guided the study is what happened after school mapping. Through a combination of instruments and/or techniques—interviews, questionnaires, focus group discussion, and document analysis, the study found that school mapping impacted in varying degrees...

The Hospitals / Residents problem with Couples (HRC) is a generalisation of the classical Hospitals / Resident problem (HR) that is important in practical applications because it models the case where couples submit joint preference lists over pairs of (typically geographically close) hospitals. In this paper we give a new NP-completeness result for the problem of deciding whether a stable matching exists, in highly restricted instances of HRC. Further, we present an Integer Programming (IP)...

To assign teachers to schools, a modified version of the well-known deferred acceptance mechanism has been proposed in the literature and is used in practice. We show that this mechanism fails to be fair and efficient for both teachers and schools. We identify a class of strategyproof mechanisms that cannot be improved upon in terms of both efficiency and fairness. Using a rich dataset on teachers’ applications in France, we estimate teachers preferences and perform a counterfactual analysis....

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) estimates that 65.6 million people are forcibly displaced, having either crossed national borders or become internally displaced within their own countries. Of this estimate, over 22.5 million are refugees. Over half of the world's refugees are children. With an average length of displacement of approximately 20 years, the majority of these children will spend their entire childhoods away from home. Refugee children have limited...

Poverty is rife in many African countries and this has serious implications for the provision of quality education. Rural schools face severe challenges that are unique to their environment. A lack of parental interest in children’s education, insufficient funding from the state, a lack of resources, underqualified teachers, and multi-grade teaching are some of the barriers to effective education. These challenges can be attributed to numerous sources, from within school structures and from...

The study primarily explored the challenges of teaching in rural basic schools in Ghana. Qualitative research method through semi-structured interviews and document analyses were used as data collection instruments. The participants for the study included six educational field workers which constituted a district education officer (Circuit Supervisor), two head teachers and three classroom teachers. Priority of the findings was highlighted on the provision of accommodation with adequate...

Prior research suggests that where pupils are 'tracked', better qualified, more experienced teachers tend to be deployed to higher attainment groups, at the expense of pupils in lower tracks. This is especially pertinent from a social justice perspective, given consistent findings in the UK that pupils from socially-disadvantaged backgrounds are over-represented in low attainment groups. This article draws on data from 380 teachers, drawn from 126 secondary schools in England, and interviews...

This literature review identifies and evaluates evidence on the effectiveness of approaches to improving teacher quality in developing countries. It examines four categories of assistance for improving teacher quality: teacher development policies; pre-service education and training; in-service professional development; and school-based support. As far as possible the review highlights practices that demonstrat effectiveness. The review describes examples from different countries, of...

School performance rating is an important factor which not only provides a quick snapshot of how the students are performing on various measurement indicators but also decides a school’s future course of actions, strategies, resources, and its existence. Despite its significant importance, the school performance framework does not consider where the schools are geographically located and the surrounding factors within which they operate. The researcher of this study presented a landscape of...

This article provides an overview of how teacher quality and learning outcomes are included in national education policies. It responds to a set of specific questions focused on strategies to improve learning, links between teacher quality and learning outcomes, and how policy seeks to overcome learning obstacles for the most disadvantaged. The article uses data collated from the national education plans of forty developing countries. It includes a summary of key lessons and observations...

Recent mass closings of schools have rocked cities across the United States. Though these urban closures—and widespread community protests—have made headlines, rural schools have also long experienced and opposed the closure of their schools. A large body of research examines these urban and rural closures from a variety of perspectives, including their economic motivations and policy implications. This review reexamines this literature, looking across context to show how school closure can...