Rebuild It and They Will Come

Improving teacher quality tops the list of today's education reform goals. State and federal policymakers, along with a wide range of philanthropists and education leaders, are pouring unprecedented support, including billions of stimulus dollars, into reforms that will help ensure that all children are taught by effective teachers.

Tackling the teacher-quality problem, particularly in the schools that serve the lowest-income and highest-need children, is the right goal. The importance of good teachers for student learning has been well-established (Hanushek, Kain, & Rivkin, 1998; Sanders and Rivers, 1996). Indeed, the consequences of the nation's high-need schools lacking and losing good teachers are devastating for student learning, school improvement and for the nation's overall economic well-being. Yet the neediest students are routinely taught by less experienced and less qualified teachers, and roughly twenty percent of new teachers in low-income urban schools will leave before year's end (Peske & Haycock, 2006).

Two worthy strategies drive the current teacher reform agenda:  entice new talent into teaching, largely through financial incentives, and raise the stakes for existing teachers, mostly through new evaluation and compensation programs.

But these strategies, while worthy, will not matter much in the long run if they ignore the structural design problems of teachers' work. More than 100 years after education leaders first campaigned for teaching to become a prized profession, akin to law and medicine, the design of teachers' work still lacks core characteristics of professional work. Teaching today has few mechanisms for meaningful feedback or collaboration, no rational system for development and promotion, and a work schedule that is disconnected from the reality of what teachers actually do and what students actually need. ...

Read more from this article in the May 2010 issue of Educational Leadership.