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The recent flurry of reports and manifestos urging a more constructive federal role in K-12 education are bringing an important issue back into the policy limelight: the fact that the nation's poorest, most vulnerable students are least likely to attend schools with fully qualified staff members.

This renewed focus is long overdue. Unequal access to the most effective teachers and other school staff remains one of the most shocking inequities in the education system.  Federal leadership in closing the staffing gaps would be welcome, indeed.

The Learning First Alliance and its members have been drawing attention to these gaps--and strategies for addressing them--for some years now.  As AFT Executive Vice President Toni Cortese and I wrote in an EdWeek commentary two years ago, "The causes of [staffing inequities] are no great mystery: We stack the deck against teachers and leaders in those schools. We force them to clear high bureaucratic hurdles throughout the hiring process, and we do not train them for the challenges they will face if hired. We deny them the working conditions and support any other professional would expect as a matter of course, and then we fail to compensate them appropriately. Finally, we shortchange their students through public school funding practices that maintain long-standing inequities between poor and wealthy schools."

The Alliance's 2005 "Framework for Staffing All High-Poverty, Low-Performing Schools with Effective Teachers and Administrators" offers a set of effective strategies for addressing this complex problem.  An important lesson of the framework--and the research on which we based it--is that changes to compensation or recruiting policies alone will not close the staffing gap. Rather, reformers must focus on factors that seldom rise to the surface of our current incentive-obsessed policy discussions: better working conditions and support for teachers in hard-to-staff schools.

As we noted here, at least one DC think tank gets this right.  In a recent report on Hamilton County Public Schools' success in narrowing the staffing gap, Education Sector's Elena Silva writes,

It seems that what the ... teachers needed most were not new peers or extra pay--although both were helpful. Rather, they needed support and recognition from the whole community, resources and tools to improve as professionals, and school leaders who could help them help their students.

It's time to get this critical issue, in all its complexity, back on the national agenda.