The final installment of the Teacher Quality 2.0 series reflects on the current state of value-added models of measuring teacher effectiveness and anticipates how they might evolve. The author concludes that the research community must tackle new research questions, use different metrics, and collect new data.

Despite America's appetite to improve teacher quality, the country's human capital systems are broken. The five main challenges are poor teacher retention, weak accountability systems, an absence of substantive teacher support, teacher isolation, and teacher salaries incorrectly reflecting areas of expertise or teacher results.

In recent years, the United States has made meaningful strides toward reforming teacher evaluation systems and requirements. That said, if advocates of these reforms rush too quickly to create new systems, they risk replacing broken models with ones that, while improved, can potentially create barriers to innovation.

The concept of “teacher quality” has undergone a profound transformation in the last decade. We now approach evaluating the quality of our teachers by measuring their ongoing performance in the classroom.

The broader issue of how we can rethink the teaching profession, make fuller use of talented teachers, and wisely spend the dollars we do have is more important than debating what the "right" wage level should be.

Teachers are the most important school-level factor in student success—but as any parent knows, all teachers are not created equal. Reforms to the current quite cursory teacher evaluation system, if done well, have the potential to remove the worst-performing teachers and, even more important, to assist the majority in improving their craft.

The real question isn’t whether we should pay all teachers more or less; it’s how to pay the right teachers more, in a way that serves students and maximizes the bang we get for the educational buck.

Teacher pension systems pose two problems for K-12 schooling: they create the potential for irresponsible fiscal stewardship and they hinder efforts to boost teacher quality.

An interview with Frederick M. Hess and Juliet P. Squire on teacher retirement plans.