The authors respond to Dan Goldhaber and Dominic Brewer’s article in the Summer 2000 issue of Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis that claimed from an analysis of NELS teacher and student data that teacher certification has little bearing on student achievement. Goldhaber and Brewer found strong and consistent evidence that, as compared with students whose teachers are uncertified, students achieve at higher levels in mathematics when they have teachers who hold standard certification in mathematics. (The same was true to a somewhat lesser extent in science.) However, they emphasized their finding that, "Contrary to conventional wisdom, mathematics and science [students] who have teachers with emergency credentials do no worse than students whose teachers have standard teaching credentials " and suggested that certification be abandoned. This article critiques the methodological grounding for this finding and presents additional data on the characteristics of the small sub-sample of teachers in NELS data base who held temporary and emergency credentials. It finds that most of these teachers have qualifications resembling those of teachers with standard certification, and that those who have more education training appear to do better in producing student achievement. It also reviews the literature on teacher education and certification as the basis for evaluating Goldhaber and Brewer’s claim that states should eliminate certification requirements and proposes additional research that would illuminate how teacher education and certification operate-and could better operate-to enable teachers to succeed in their work.

What is known about recruiting and retaining teachers for hard-to-staff-schools runs counter to many of the assumptions undergirding the teacher quality provisions of No Child Left Behind. Evidence regarding incentives, recruitment pathways, new teacher induction programs, and alternative routes shed considerable light on what needs to be done to ensure a "highly qualified" teacher for every student. Educators, armed with the right knowledge, can play an important role in getting both the funding and politics in place to create and support the policies and programs that can make a difference.

VER THE last decade, policy makers and business leaders have come to realize what parents have always knownteachers make the most difference in student achievement. Thanks to new statistical and analytical methods used by a wide range of researchers, the evidence is mounting that teacher quality accounts for the lion's share of variance in student test scores. 1 However, while consensus is growing among school reformers that teachers are the most important school-related determinant of student achievement, there is not much more than ephemeral agreement on what we mean by "teach

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