what kids are doing and what they
mean by it, and to manage classrooms
and support children. And, to be a good
teacher, you have to care more about
the performance of your students and
how they learn than about your own
performance.
Some very academically able people
who go into teaching are used to getting
rewarded for things they do by themselves. But it’s a very different thing to
help other people succeed. In teaching,
your effectiveness doesn’t depend on
your own efforts alone. It depends on
how well you can support and motivate
your students to work at learning.
What can we learn from other coun-
tries about attracting the right kind of
teachers?
There are several things to learn. If you
look at the countries that once were
not high achieving, but now are both
high achieving and equitable in their
student outcomes, you’ll see that they
have invested in teacher preparation
and development programs to accomplish those gains. Finland, Singapore,
and South Korea, for example, not only
invest in high-quality preparation, but
also pay all of the costs for candidates
to get that preparation. They also give
candidates a stipend while they are in
training, so that no one has to go into
debt to enter teaching or suffer from less
preparation than they need.
So we could easily recruit and retain
the best and brightest teachers if we
actually made good on what President
Obama said when he was campaigning:
“If you will teach, we’ll pay for your col-
lege education.”
States that have done that have raised
the bar. For many years, the North Car-
olina Teaching Fellows underwrote top
high school students’ college education
at state universities where they prepared
to teach and added additional sum-
mer coursework to help them learn to
become education leaders. In exchange
for this support, candidates pledged to
teach for at least four years in North
Carolina schools. The state brought
many thousands of high-ability people
into teaching that way, with a disproportionate number of them in high-need fields like math and science, plus a
large representation of men and minority candidates, who are usually in short
supply. A follow-up study seven years
later showed that more than 75 percent
of these folks were still in teaching, and
some of the remainder were already
working in education administration.
North Carolina Teaching Fellows
We want in teachers a
combination of strong
academic ability and
the capacities to be very
alert and attentive and
to care about kids.
did essentially what some nations have
done: select and support high-ability
people who have demonstrated a commitment and enthusiasm to work with
children. These people not only enter
but also build their careers in the profession and become leaders and raise up
the whole system.
And why isn’t this happening more often?
There is unfortunately a lot of teacher
bashing and bad-mouthing of the profession these days. Some politicians and
philanthropists have adopted a very
punitive and shortsighted approach—
putting an emphasis on sanctions
based on test scores and not on training, development, or equalization of
resources, and then urging the firing
of teachers whose students do not
score well on tests. This leaves teachers
underprepared and undersupported to
do the important job they need to do. It
is no way to build a profession. In fact,
it creates an anti-profession.
I just read the MetLife Survey of the
American Teacher, which said that
U.S. teachers’ satisfaction with their
profession had declined 15 points.
Is that surprising to you?
I just looked at that, too, and it’s not
surprising. That drop in satisfaction was
in just two years after 2009. The decline
was closer to 20 percentage points if
you go back to 2008. The survey also
showed that the proportion of teachers planning to leave had increased by
12 percent in just two years. These last
three years have been devastating for
teaching. All over the United States I
hear from teachers that they are discouraged, particularly by the way national
discourse assumes that all the ills of the
system are the sole fault of teachers.
And it’s going to become much,
much worse as test-based teacher evaluation is rolled out. Researchers have
extensive evidence that the ratings
teachers get from these value-added systems are hugely error-prone, unreliable,
and to a great extent, shaped by which
students are assigned to a teacher in a
given year. 4
All of the things that are happening
to undermine education today—larger
class sizes, fewer days in the school year,
reductions in the number of reading specialists and tutors, growing poverty and
homelessness among children—
influence achievement gains and contribute
to what is being called a “teacher effectiveness” rating. The effect of everything
that matters for learning is being attributed to the teacher alone. And teachers
who teach the highest-need students are
most affected by both the unfairness of
current education policies and the bias
in teacher effectiveness ratings.
What are better ways to evaluate teach-
ers, especially beginning teachers?
We know a lot now about how to
undertake high-quality performance
assessments of teachers. Since the
National Board for Professional Teaching Standards portfolio was created in
