Background: School leaders argue that to make the improvements in both quality and equity that government mandates demand, they need more flexibility with regard to personnel management—specifically, teacher assignment. According to some, such flexibility is constrained by collective bargaining between teachers unions and school districts. Purpose: To examine how collective bargaining agreements govern the assignment of teachers to schools and classrooms and whether any observed variation among the agreements is due to district demographics and/or performance. Research Methods: Sixty-six collective bargaining agreements between teachers unions and Florida's school districts were collected and analyzed for provisions germane to teacher assignment. The authors looked for contrasts among the contracts by district size, district socioeconomic status, district race, and district Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test performance with data from the Florida Department of Education. Findings: Although staffing rules often favor seniority, contracts also grant administrators more discretion over transfers, reductions, and reassignments than critics have suggested. In addition, contracts are no more likely to restrict administrators' decisions about assignment in large, poor, minority, or low-performing districts than they are in other districts. Implications for Research and Practice: Future research should consider whether teacher assignment looks any different in districts where contracts grant administrators discretion over teacher assignment. If so, what norms have replaced seniority as the primary basis for transfers, reductions, and reassignments, and do these norms hold promise for school improvement and equity? The authors encourage the development and testing of new systems that use teachers' past performance with different types of students to make evidence-based assignments.

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By analyzing data from the Schools and Staffing Survey, the authors empirically test four of the core assumptions embedded in current arguments for expanding alternative teacher certification (AC): AC attracts experienced candidates from fields outside of education; AC attracts top-quality, well-trained teachers; AC disproportionately trains teachers to teach in hard-to-staff schools; and AC alleviates out-of-field teaching. Although there are some differences in the backgrounds of alternatively and traditionally certified teachers, the findings suggest that AC programs have not substantially changed the pool from which new teachers are drawn. Findings further indicate that AC programs do not attract a disproportionate number of candidates to teach in difficult-to-staff schools, nor are they effective means for solving the problem of out-of-field teaching.