Georgia Teachers
Across the globe, the author see increasing interest in attracting, retaining, developing, and motivating great teachers. Student achievement has been found to correlate with economic and social progress. Recent studies have shown that teacher quality is the main school-based predictor of student achievement and that several consecutive years of outstanding teaching can offset the learning deficits of disadvantaged students. However, establishing the right teacher policies to ensure that every classroom has a motivated, supported, and competent teacher remains a challenge; evidence on the impacts of many teacher policies remains insufficient and scattered, the impact of many reforms depends on specific design features, and teacher policies can have very different impacts depending on the context and the education policies in place. The main focus of SABER-teachers is on policy design, rather than on policy implementation. SABER teachers analyzes the teacher policies formally adopted by education systems. However, policies ‘on the ground,’ that is, policies as they are actually implemented, may differ quite substantially from policies as originally designed. In fact, they often do differ, because of the political economy of the reform process, lack of capacity of the organizations in charge of implementing them, or the interaction between these policies and specific contextual factors. Since SABER-Teachers collects limited data on policy implementation, the assessment of teacher policies presented in this report needs to be complemented with detailed information that describes the actual configuration of teacher policies on the ground.