Rethinking Schools is Pleased to offer Keeping Quality Teachers Teaching

<http://www.rethinkingschools.org/special_reports/quality_teachers/> , a special online collection of 17 articles published in Rethinking Schools that attempts to address the difficult issues of teacher recruitment, retention, and quality.

You can download a free PDF of the full collection of articles <http://www.rethinkingschools.org/special_reports/quality_teachers/> or view individual articles by visiting our website at www.rethinkingschools.org <http://www.rethinkingschools.org/> .

For many years, schools in the United States have faced a teacher shortage, especially in areas such as special education, bilingual education, math and science. This shortage has been exacerbated by an alarming failure on the part of school districts to retain teachers—up to 50 percent of new teachers leave after five years. Moreover, studies have shown an inequitable distribution of veteran and newer teachers within and across districts, often reinforcing other institutional inequities based on race and class.

Addressing this situation is complicated and requires us to confront fundamental problems that face our public schools: inadequate and unequal funding, lack of planning and collaboration time for teachers, large class sizes and difficult working conditions, faulty mentoring and evaluation systems, archaic salary systems, inadequate preservice and in-service professional development, and so on.

We would like to thank the Ford Foundation for financial support in underwriting the research and writing of several of these Keeping Quality Teachers Teaching <http://www.rethinkingschools.org/special_reports/quality_teachers/> articles and in the assembly of this special web collection. We encourage you to share this collection with colleagues, parents, legislators, and the media.

Sincerely

Bob Peterson
for the editors of Rethinking Schools <http://www.rethinkingschools.org/>