Welcome. This is Anastasia Yuglova bringing you the Cato Daily Podcast.

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A new policy analysis released by Cato adjunct scholar Marie Griffin,

giving kids the chaff, how to find and keep the teachers we need.

Finds of the best teachers fare worse than their mediocre

colleagues due to biases in hiring and compensation practices. The study

reveals serious flaws in teacher training, selection, and retention practices

of monopolistic state school systems

and argues that market-driven personnel policies produce a far superior alternative to the status quo.

Marie discusses the problem and the possible solutions in today's podcast.

Why does schools struggle to find and retain good teachers?

Well, there are at least a couple of different dynamics at work.

One, which surprised me a lot in the course of research for this paper is that

school administrators don't always seem to be motivated to hire people that will become the most

capable teachers. It seems surprising, but it also seems to be true. There are only a couple of really measurable characteristics

that are reliably associated with good teaching. One of them is higher standardized test scores

on the part of the teachers themselves and the other is a math

or science major for teachers who will be teaching those subjects and yet somehow teachers

that have those credentials are not any more likely to be hired, you know, as a result of interviewing for schools, and the teachers who don't have those credentials.

In fact, remarkably, administrators are somewhat more likely to hire a teacher who has an education degree than a teacher who has a math degree, despite a recognized national shortage of highly skilled math teachers.

How are teachers hired and compensated in the current system?

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