The Study
Marisa Burian-Fitzgerald and Debbi Harris, research analysts at the Education Policy Center at MSU, analyze national teaching data to determine whether differences exist between traditional and charters public school teachers.

Findings
The researchers used data from the National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES) from the 1999-2000 school year. They compared several characteristics of traditional and charter school teachers. The analysis included responses of more than 20,000 traditional and charter school teachers. The authors examine teacher quality using several measures, including certification, years of experience, and undergraduate college selectivity. What they found was that the two groups look quite different on several measures of teacher quality. Teachers in charter schools have, on average, half the experience of traditional public school teachers. They are far less likely to be certified, or to have certification in their main teaching assignment. Charter school teachers are more likely to have attended selective colleges and are slightly less likely to have attended less selective colleges than traditional public school teachers. Because charter schools are often located in urban areas with higher percentages of poor and minority students, the researcher also analyzed the data with controls for percentages of the school’s students eligible for free or reduced lunch and percentage of minority students. Even after controlling for these characteristics, charter school teachers were 19 percent less likely to be certified in any field and 23 percent less likely to be certified in their main assignment field. For the authors, the findings have a policy implications. “Policymakers vary in the amount of flexibility in hiring they have given charter school operators. Arizona’s policymakers were comfortable with no certification requirements, North Carolina’s policymakers were more cautious, and California’s policymakers required all charter school teachers to be certified. It is up to state policymakers to decide what qualifications they feel are important and then establish regulations that encourage charter school operators to select teachers with those qualifications without discouraging innovative hiring practices.”

What It Means To You
Are there wide differences between charter and traditional teachers in your district? What implications do these difference have for teaching and learning in your district and throughout the state?

For More Information
Burian-Fitzgerald, M. & Harris, D. (2004). “Teacher Recruitment and Teacher Quality? Are Charter Schools Different?” Policy Report Number 20. Educational Policy Center at Michigan State University. The full report can be downloaded from the EPC Web site at www.epc.msu.edu .

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