Imagining Successful Schools — from nytimes.com by Joe Nocera

Excerpt:

The main thing that works is treating teaching as a profession, and teachers as professionals. That means that teachers are as well paid as other professionals, that they have a career ladder, that they go to elite schools where they learn their craft, and that they are among the top quartile of college graduates instead of the bottom quartile. When I suggested that American cities couldn’t afford to pay teachers the way we pay engineers or lawyers, Tucker scoffed. With rare exception, he said, the cost per pupil in the places with the best educational systems is less than the American system, even though their teachers are far better paid. “They are not spending more money; they are spending money differently,” he said.

…

Tucker envisions the same kind of accountability for teachers as exists for, say, lawyers in a firm — where it is peers holding each other accountable rather than some outside force. People who don’t pull their own weight are asked to leave. The ethos is that people help each other to become better for the good of the firm.

 

From DSC:
With a special thanks going out to James Bratt,
Professor of History at Calvin College, for this resource.