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How can the Institute of Economic Affairs help teachers? Walter Allan, director of the IEA's new Teachers' Resource Centre, explains the Institute's plans to develop its service to teachers and schools.

The mantra of the current school reform in the US is that high-quality teachers produce high-achieving students. As a result, the educational system should hold teachers accountable for student outcomes, offering bonus pay to the most effective teachers and shoving the least effective ones out the door. In order to implement such a policy, a valid and reliable measure of teacher quality, and the reformers have zeroed in on one such measure, which is known as the value-added approach. This article explores three major questions that arise from this development: 1) why did the value-added measure of teaching emerge at this point in the history of American education?; 2) What are the core characteristics of teaching as a professional practice that make it so hard to perform effectively and so hard to measure accurately?; and 3) And under these circumstances, what are the likely consequences of using the value-added measure of teaching? Adapted from the source document.

Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to share findings from research on preservice social studies teachers' visions of themselves as they prepare to enter their student teaching experience.


Design/methodology/approach
The guiding research question for this study asked, "How do preservice social studies teachers articulate their visions of themselves as powerful social studies teachers just before their student teaching experience?"


Findings
The authors found that their visions of themselves emphasized aspects of powerful teaching, yet lacked explicit and important connections to social studies teaching. In their discussion and conclusions, they share the implications of these findings for their social studies teacher education program and other social studies education programs generally.


Originality/value
The authors contend that while powerful teaching is important, without an emphasis on powerful social studies teaching, they may struggle to achieve social studies teaching goals and purposes, such as teaching for democratic living, the common good, or citizenship. The distinction between powerful teaching and powerful social studies teaching, the authors believe, should be of concern for social studies teacher educators interested in positioning student teachers to create classroom spaces focused on the common good, national and global societies, or the deepening of democracy.

In this paper authors use non-experimental data from government schools in Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh, two of the largest Indian states, to present average school outcomes by contract status of teachers. The authors find that after controlling for teacher characteristics and school fixed effects, contract teachers are associated with higher effort than civil service teachers with permanent tenures. Higher teacher effort is associated with better student performance after controlling for other school inputs and student characteristics. Given that salaries earned by contract teachers are one fourth or less of civil service teachers, contract teachers may be a more cost-effective resource. However, contracts 'as they are' appear weak. Not only do contract teachers have fairly low average effort in absolute terms, but those who have been on the job for at least one full tenure have lower effort than others who are in the first contract period.

In 2013 the Swedish government launched a reform on career services for teachers that introduced first-teachersas a new category of teachers. Since this reform still is in the process of being rolled out, we know fairly little of its impact, especially concerning VET teachers that are appointed first-teachers. This paper explores and analyses two cases of VET first-teachers with focus on the implications on educational leadership practices in their work with school improvement where 'distributed leadership'is used as a lens forunderstanding the characteristic features of leadership practices. The re-sults show that the VET first-teachers consider themselves to represent an important educational leadership being process leaders for creating a culture built on mutual trust, turning the focus of school improvement from a 'top-down' perspective to change 'from below'. They become 'brokers'and a link between school management and their colleagues, even if there are some difficulties. Moreover they visualise differ-ent practices and foster a new awareness –concerning e.g. assessment and the relation-ship between school and work-place –that seem to influence collegial discourse.