The vast majority of research and policy related to teacher quality focuses on the supply of teachers and ignores teacher demand. In particular, the important role of school principals in hiring teachers is rarely considered. Using interviews of school principals in a midsized Florida school district, we provide an exploratory mixed methods analysis of the teacher characteristics principals prefer. Our findings contradict the conventional wisdom that principals undervalue content knowledge and intelligence. Principals in our study ranked content knowledge third among a list of twelve characteristics. Intelligence does appear less important at first glance, but this is apparently because principals believe all applicants who meet certification requirements meet a minimum threshold on intelligence and because some intelligent teachers have difficulty connecting with students. More generally, we find that principals prefer an “individual mix” of personal and professional qualities. They also create an “organizational mix,” hiring teachers who differ from those already in the school in terms of race, gender, experience, and skills, and an “organizational match,” in which teachers have similar work habits and a high propensity to remain with the school over time. Because of tenure rules, many principals also prefer less experienced (untenured) teachers, even though research suggests that they are less effective.

How Principals "Bridge and Buffer" 212 American Journal of Education with different educational requirements and reforming colleges of education. At the federal level, the Highly Qualified Teachers (HQT) provision of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) builds on a long history of state-level certification requirements by mandating that all public school teachers hold a bachelor's degree and demonstrate subject-matter knowledge (Smith et al. 2005). These direct policies, however, are not the only ones influencing local teacher-quality efforts. The Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) provision of NCLB and other high-stakes test-based accountability policies also define expected student outcomes but allow school personnel to determine how those outcomes can best be achieved. There are good reasons to expect that NCLB and related forms of accountability will have a significant, albeit indirect, influence on school efforts related to teacher quality. 1 Research on high-stakes test-based accountability has identified "a more capable and committed faculty" as an important component of the theory of action underlying the reform effort (Malen et al. 2002, 114). Studies have also documented that high-stakes accountability exerts a significant influence on teaching (

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Policymakers are revolutionizing teacher evaluation by attaching greater stakes to student test scores and observation-based teacher effectiveness measures, but relatively little is known about why they often differ so much. Quantitative analysis of thirty schools suggests that teacher value-added measures and informal principal evaluations are positively, but weakly, correlated. Qualitative analysis suggests that some principals give high value-added teachers low ratings because the teachers exert too little effort and are “lone wolves” who work in isolation and contribute little to the school community. The results suggest that the method of evaluation may not only affect which specific teachers are rewarded in the short term, but shape the qualities of teacher and teaching students experience in the long term.

Having been adopted by legislatures in over a dozen states, postsecondary merit aid programs are largely concentrated in the southeastern United States. The observed clustering pattern seems to support previous evidence that policies spread between proximate states, a phenomenon referred to by political scientists as policy diffusion. Often, however, policy diffusion is not complete, and one or more states in a region fail to adopt. By interviewing policymakers throughout the southeastern United States—including actors in the three states in the region without merit aid—the study addresses the following question: Why do diffusion pressures lead to adoption in some states but not in others? Studying state “hold‐outs” promises not only to uncover the reasons for failed legislation in specific state contexts but also to better our understanding of the limits of diffusion theory.

Guided by Honig and Hatch's conceptualization of bridging and buffering, we analyzed the first teacher collective bargaining agreements negotiated after the enactment of the Ohio Teacher Evaluation System to understand how state law has shaped provisions for teacher evaluation, compensation, reductions in force (RIF), transfers, and contract renewal. We found surprising variation in provisions across districts. Most notable was how districts defined comparable evaluations in making RIF decisions. Bridging districts provided the greatest protections for the most accomplished teachers, regardless of seniority. In contrast, buffering districts have RIF provisions based on seniority.

Using logistic regression, this study sought to understand the relationship between district characteristics, district finances, levy characteristics, and campaign expenditures with new operating levy outcomes. We found that employee benefits as a percentage of the district's budget were negatively associated with levy outcomes, while salaries were positively associated with levy outcomes, suggesting that voters may be more sensitive to retirement and healthcare benefits than salaries when voting. While campaign spending was related to levy success, types of expenditures were largely insignificant. School district personnel must be cognizant of the local conditions in crafting campaigns and recruiting community stakeholders.