Recruiting, training, and compensating teaching professionals appropriately are probably the most important factors for improving accountability and academic achievement in America’s schools. As educators rush to make curriculum overhauls, respond to enormous deficiencies in student test scores, and address substantial budget shortages, the pressure on districts to fill empty classrooms with teachers who meet high standards is enormous. The national push to raise the bar for who should be allowed to teach and exactly what credentials and experiences they should bring to the nation’s classrooms has led to new ways of defining what is relevant education and background for the teaching profession. Some states are requiring more formal academic degree and certificate qualifications while others are thinking outside of the box, and pursuing professionals who have proven track records in non-teaching professions, e.g. military and business people. While state departments of education would do well to establish clear and definite guidelines for teaching candidates, their process of evaluating prospective candidates must be flexible and broad enough to accommodate the recruitment of persons who meet certain qualitative terms or possess attributes that lend themselves to a successful teaching career.

Similar to other professionals, teachers are expected to have strong subject knowledge, respectable verbal and written communication skills, and the capacity to perform well in their chosen field. However, classroom teachers are also tasked with building effective learning environments and nurturing young minds in ways that will help students discover and engage their gifts and abilities. These responsibilities require a unique combination of leadership, creativity, motivational, and interpersonal skills. By contrast, the success of persons in the accounting, legal, medical, and finance fields is more easily tied to their own job performance and other quantifiable measurements employed in the routine operations of their enterprises. Conversely, classroom teacher success is not necessarily measurable or tied to individual performance because most performance evaluation processes are being designed to tie teacher success to their respective students’ academic achievement, e.g. test scores, and the performance of a school peer group is also being employed as a proxy for teacher performance. These existing proposals appear to be reasonable approaches to evaluating how well or nor teaching professionals fulfill their job responsibilities.

As policymakers and school officials continue to identify pools of teaching talent and refine methods of evaluating this new talent in the teaching profession as a whole, the biggest obstacles may very well be related to the development of hiring, training, and compensation systems and processes that are conducive to long-term sustainability for the success of the nation’s public schools. Because we know that teacher quality is a proven indicator of student academic success, aligning strong classroom teachers with evaluation methods that are fair and meaningful is one recipe for ensuring that we continue on the right path toward high quality public schooling.