Access to Effective Teaching for Disadvantaged Students

Recent federal initiatives emphasize measuring teacher effectiveness and ensuring that disadvantaged students have equal access to effective teachers. This study substantially broadens the existing evidence on access to effective teaching by examining access in 29 geographically dispersed school districts over the 2008-2009 to 2010-2011 school years.

The report describes disadvantaged students' access to effective teaching in grades 4 through 8 in English/language arts (ELA) and math, using value-added analysis to measure effective teaching. On average, disadvantaged students had less access to effective teaching in these districts. Providing equal access to effective teaching for FRL and non-FRL students would reduce the student achievement gap from 28 percentile points to 26 percentile points in ELA and from 26 percentile points to 24 percentile points in math in a given year.