Virginia Governor Mark R. Warner is leading ECS' efforts to draw policymakers' attention to the needs of "hard-to-staff" schools - those that have a hard time finding and retaining adequately trained teachers who are effective with their student populations. Generally, such schools have a high percentage of relatively new teachers because more experienced teachers, whose seniority gives them greater choice over their teaching assignment, tend to go elsewhere.

"We've seen communities go after good teachers, but unfortunately many communities don't have the resources or the strategies to both recruit and keep qualified teachers - especially communities in urban and rural areas. This is particularly true in schools that are made up disproportionately of poor, minority students," Warner noted in a speech to The 2003 National Forum on Education Policy.

Warner's agenda as 2003-04 ECS chairman focuses on the following areas:

• Better preparation for teachers to work in hard-to-serve schools, rewards for institutions that provide well-trained teachers for those schools, and new accountability systems to assess how programs geared toward staffing hard-to-serve schools actually work
  
  
• More creative thinking about recruitment and retention, learning, for instance, from the success of the Peace Corps, the military and the business world; exit interviews with teachers to determine why they are leaving; and identifying what makes some high-performing teachers stay in challenging schools
  
  
• Specialized teaching strategies for the neediest students, including more direct, hands-on learning strategies to teach more traditional academic subjects such as reading and math
  
  
• Supporting and rewarding principals and superintendents who help turn around hard-to-staff schools.

Asking policymakers to double their efforts in recruiting and retaining high-quality teachers for hard-to-staff schools, Warner noted, "There's nothing that will be more important in closing the achievement gap, nothing that will be more important in meeting the goal of having a highly qualified teacher in every classroom by the year 2006. And nothing that will better ensure we don't have to reread this topic another 50 years from now if we put our shoulders to the wheel on this very, very important effort."