New Pathways for Teachers, New Promises for Students

In a recent AEI Teacher Quality 2.0 report, Timothy Knowles argues persuasively for radical changes with a practical mindset. His article is called “New pathways for teachers, new promises for students: A vision for developing excellent teachers.” Knowles, John Dewey Director of the University of Chicago’s Urban Education Institute, writing as part of the American Enterprise Institute’s Teacher Quality 2.0 series, focuses on reform of teachers and concludes, “If we are to significantly improve academic outcomes for American children, we must re-conceptualize what it means to teach, and build ambitious new systems to recruit, prepare, place, retain, incent, and hold individuals and institutions accountable for results. . . And, finally, everyone—organized labor included—must put a stake in the ground, and take unfamiliar steps toward making teaching a legitimate profession.”

The article makes compelling arguments for changes that are big enough to offer hope of real change yet realistic enough to be feasible certainly. Knowles consolidates his recommendations into six categories:

• Recruitment: Aggressively subsidize teacher education programs that deliver results; eliminate federal policies that conflate certification with quality; increase beginning teacher salaries; improve tools to assess aspiring teacher candidates.
• Preparation: Demand an undergraduate major in the teaching subject area for all teacher candidates; dramatically diversify approaches to teacher training; institute results-based, renewable teacher licensure.
• Placement: Encourage “preparation to placement” pipelines; invest in district-level recruitment; place cohorts of teachers from particular training institutions in specific schools.
• Early Retention: Encourage school systems and teacher education programs to jointly support new teachers; measure and report on which schools are or are not good places to learn and work.
• Career Incentives: Diversify roles for exemplary teachers; base compensation on student success; provide ongoing, job-embedded training and development.
• Accountability: Develop tools that accurately measure multiple indicators of teacher success; measure and report on the extent to which schools are organized for improvement; hold all teacher training institutions publicly accountable for graduate hiring, retention, and classroom success; give students incentives to care about their learning.

Frederick M. Hess, the Director of Education Policy Studies at AEI, in the foreword to the report, fits Knowles’ work into the larger framework of the AEI Teacher Quality 2.0 Reports:

As we start to rethink outdated tenure, evaluation, and pay systems, we must take care to respect how uncertain our efforts are and avoid tying our hands in ways that we will regret in the decade ahead. Well-intentioned legislators too readily replace old credential- and paper-based micromanagement with mandates that rely heavily on still-nascent observational evaluations and student outcome measurements that posit as many questions as answers. . . AEI’s Teacher Quality 2.0 series seeks to reinvigorate America’s now-familiar conversations about teacher quality by looking at today’s reform efforts as constituting initial steps on a long path forward.