National Commission on Teaching and America's Future (NCTAF)

Starting with its first report in 1996, the National Commission on Teaching and America's Future (NCTAF) has worked to ensure that teacher quality be understood as a key policy issue crucial for successful education reform in the United States. Led at its inception by North Carolina governor Jim Hunt and Stanford professor Linda Darling-Hammond, who served as the Commission's executive director, NCTAF published What Matters Most: Teaching for America's Future and called for widespread changes in how K–12 teachers are recruited, prepared, and retained. The report's recommendations inspired creation of state partnerships, facilitated new alliances among nonprofits, and led to efforts at state and federal levels to rethink policies and practices about teachers and teaching quality.

The Commission included elected officials (two governors, one member of Congress, and state legislators), college presidents, teachers and school administrators, union leaders from the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association, university faculty, business leaders, and philanthropists. Almost 15 years after What Matters Most appeared in print, the Commission's five core recommendations still resonate with education reformers and with members of the public worried about schooling and the outcomes of schooling.

• 1.
  Get serious about standards, for both students and teachers.
• 2.
  Reinvent teacher preparation and professional development.
• 3.
  Fix teacher recruitment and put qualified teachers in every classroom.
• 4.
  Encourage and reward teacher knowledge and skill.
• 5.
  Create schools that are organized for student and teacher success.

In one way or another, the nation still grapples with the challenges behind each of these recommendations. Their importance has been cast into bolder relief because accountability for student outcomes has become a central force in American public education. While NCTAF did not address accountability for student and teacher outcomes in its first publication, the Commission's subsequent work has sought to link improved student, teacher, [Page 610]and system performance to NCTAF's values and policies.

Today, NCTAF membership also includes prominent figures from public life; it is cochaired by former U.S. secretary of education Richard Riley and by Ted Sanders, former president of the Education Commission of the States, as well as accomplished leaders from the public sector, business, education, and higher education.

Thomas Carroll has served as NCTAF president since 2001, and he leads a Commission staff that has state, national, and other policy expertise. NCTAF continues to produce work that helps to define or redefine the core issues surrounding successful schooling and learning in the United States.

Through its 2003 report, No Dream Denied: A Pledge to America's Children, NCTAF reconfirmed its commitment to the five core recommendations from What Matters Most, and it gave major emphasis to organizing “every school for teaching and learning success.” To that end, the Commission took steps to raise the national visibility of teacher retention. The Commission was particularly concerned with teacher turnover and the multiple reasons for teachers deciding not to continue professional practice. The real problem was not teacher supply but rather the fact that too many schools were hiring unprepared or under-qualified individuals to provide classroom instruction. The inability of schools to create strong professional cultures engendered conditions for high teacher turnover.

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