In Teaching Matters, economist and education researcher Marcus A. Winters proposes to improve public education by changing the way we recruit, retain, and pay teachers. Many teachers are not meeting our expectations. President Obama even acknowledged this during an "Open for Questions" forum soon after he took office. Yet how do we sort out the good teachers from the bad? The student-proficiency data from now-ubiquitous standardized testing has created an information revolution in American education. We now have objective, reliable measure of student proficiency and can tie them to data on individual teachers and on our public education in general. The current system attempts to ensure teacher quality through training and a series of "screens." However, the data suggests that this is precisely the wrong approach. Our inability to spot quality teachers before they enter the classroom suggests that we should first open our doors to teachers and then focus on distinguishing between the effective and ineffective ones.

Introduction Chapter 1: How Data Can Help Improve Public Schools Chapter 2: How Important Are Teachers? Chapter 3: How Do We Identify Effective Teachers? Chapter 4: How We Compensate Public School Teachers? Chapter 5: Improving the Compensation System Chapter 6: Retirement Benefits Chapter 7: Who Should Teach? Chapter 8: Conclusion