Erin Hames, deputy chief of staff for Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal, was quoted by Metro Atlanta as saying, "We strongly believe that the most important thing in a student's education is the quality of the teacher in the classroom." While that statement seems intuitive, how to motivate teachers and support their professional growth and achievement has become disputed territory.

What Motivates Teachers
Teachers go into teaching knowing that their students' parents will probably have better salaries than they do. Classroom teachers usually make between $30,000 and $50,000 per year. Construction workers, for example, may make between $20,000 and $67,000 per year. When asked why they choose to teach most will give answers such as, "To make a difference," "Because I enjoy working with children," or "My favorite teacher inspired me to enter this profession." A study by Andre Bishay, a graduate student at Harvard in 1996, indicated that most teachers are motivated by higher-operational goals, such as job satisfaction and student success.

Training Good Teachers
Teacher education has come under a lot of scrutiny since the mid-1980's. In 1985, Missouri issued the last "Lifetime" teacher certifications. Instead, teachers were issued teaching licences for specific amounts of time, with additional training requirements written into each level of certification. Other states developed similar standards. Programs for encouraging continuing education for teachers, such as the now defunct Career Ladder programs, were developed in the hope of fostering the development of high-quality teachers. Many teachers embraced the program as a means of developing quality programs for their students or as a way of funding further education. Teachers are often, by choice, life-long learners who are frequently students in the evening and on the weekends.

Teacher Reviews and Evaluations
With the advent of No Child Left Behind and an increased push toward accountability in school performance, principals and superintendents were and are under increasing pressure to develop high-quality staff. This means conducting formal and informal observations of staff performance, holding teacher training sessions and developing a system for evaluating staff performance. School officials endeavor to create consistent tools to ensure consistent evaluations for all teachers, and positive means to assist teachers who may be very strong in one area of expertise yet weak in another area. With ever-tightening budgets, supervisors must scramble for incentives to offer for individual and team successes. The teachers usually understand the situation, and more important than the actual reward to most is the recognition that something good has occurred.

Student Test Scores as Teacher Motivation
One of the most recent innovations toward providing teacher motivation is to tie student standardized test scores to teacher evaluations. This has an upside in that it stresses the importance of making sure students learn the material they will need to pass the tests, but has the downside of reducing flexibility when addressing individual student learning styles.