American schools spend more than $2.6 billion annually replacing teachers who have dropped out of the teaching profession. At a Capitol Hill briefing on June 23, the Alliance for Excellent Education released a new report which cites comprehensive induction, especially in a teacher's first two years on the job, as the single effective strategy to stem the rapidly increasing teacher attrition rate.

The report, Tapping the Potential: Retaining and Developing High Quality New Teachers includes federal policy recommendations, in-depth analysis of new teacher induction practices, and four case studies: Connecticut BEST, Santa Cruz New Teacher Project (California), Tangipahoa FIRST (Louisiana), and The Toledo Plan (Ohio).

Out of Print

(For information on teacher retention, see Tapping the Potential: Retaining and Developing High-Quality New Teachers).

New Teacher Excellence: Retaining Our Best examines what we know about effective induction programs and offer examples of programs around the nation that might serve as models for others. It argues that by implementing effective mentoring and professional development programs for new teachers in schools across the country, we greatly increase our chances of retaining the teachers who are coming into the profession as the result of a variety of recruitment efforts. For the sake of all of our nation’s children—and in particular those at highest risk—we must not only attract excellent teachers, we must also keep them.

Out of Print (Please see: From No Child Left Behind to Every Child a Graduate)

In 2002, the Alliance for Excellent Education published Every Child a Graduate, one of the first nationally focused efforts to draw attention to the problems in many of the country’s middle and high schools, and to encourage federal—as well as state and local—policy reform designed to improve student achievement and attainment. Since that report’s release, the knowledge base that informs what is known about both the problems and the ways to solve them has grown dramatically, thanks to the efforts of researchers and educators across the country.

In August 2008, the Alliance released From No Child Left Behind to Every Child a Graduate, which attempts to lay out a new framework for action to improve secondary schools that is based on this expanded pool of research and predicated on the recognition that, to be effective, reform must be comprehensive and systemic.