The article, summed up in the last paragraph:

The Teach for America alumni assumed they already had a seat at the table, and a genuine voice in policy creation. The student teachers in Michigan were just trying to get hired.

D.C. Council Chairman Kwame Brown seeks to recruit top teachers to low performing schools by freeing them for two or three years from the district’s oppressive IMPACT evaluation system.

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If Brown’s idea went national, however, think of the incentive it would provide for teachers who want to actually teach (as opposed to just complying with top down micromanagement) to transfer to poor schools in order to do so. Before long, the suburbs would have lost so many teachers that they would be filling their classrooms with 23-year-old wonders trying to prove how hard they can work with no sleep and no peace of mind, while under the thumb of evaluators whose lack of knowledge just makes them more self-righteous.

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Liberating teachers who commit to the toughest schools would be the first step in liberating all teachers and students from excessive test prep, narrowing the curriculum and rote instruction.

Faber said the point of the program is to treat parents as partners in their child’s education. “We see a lot of parent involvement things that really look at parents as a deficit, that they don’t know how to do something, so we’re going to swoop in and show them how,” he said. “What this model works on is that the parent is an asset that has some knowledge that we don’t have.”

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Pay or no pay, Crossroads teacher Hurvitz is on board. “When the community cares and everybody’s there to support each other, the children will thrive. That is the whole key; we’re not working in isolation.”

From a joint statement by UNESCO, UNDP, UNICEF, ILO and Education International on the occasion of World Teachers’ Day:

If we want to give equal opportunities to our daughters and sons to realize their full potential and claim their rights, we must devise policies and strategies that attract and motivate capable women and men to teach, while also enabling them to create gender-equal learning environments. More and better education for all requires good teachers and incentives to encourage male and female teachers into all areas and levels of teaching. This will ensure that boys and girls have appropriate role models throughout their schooling.

The idea is simple: the state pays top academic students to attend a public college, and in return they spend at least four years teaching in a public school.

In the 20 years since the first fellows began teaching, the program has flourished. High school seniors selected for the program average about 1,200 on the SATs compared with a state average of 1,000. Of the 500 fellows chosen each year, about a quarter are black or Hispanic.

Chances are good that they are being taught by teachers with little or no experience.

Since no statistics/facts are actually offered in this article except for a chart that many people might miss, let me spell out what that chart says.

In 1987, 3% of the teaching force were brand new teachers. In 2007, it was 6.5%.

While that is technically double (the “more” referenced in the article), it is hardly enough to say that “Chances are good that they are being taught by teachers with little or no experience.”

What this article could have used was some hard facts. Like raw numbers, percentages, you know, that sort of thing. Something to lend some credibility to the anecdotes and personal stories shared.

Great article! Some highlights:

How can teachers be the cause of our troubles … (Stewart pause here) … AND the solution?

YES, IT’S A little crazy. But it’s not new.

From the days of the one-room schoolhouse on the prairie, our relationship with teachers has been, well, complicated.

We idolize them, but second-guess their judgment. Love the ones we know, but disparage the ones we don’t.

We tell them, again and again, that they do the most important work in the world, but rarely ask them what we need to do to improve schools.

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Which brings us to our first theme: Ambitious but frugal, we built that school system by turning to women, mainly because they’d work cheap.

School boards were up front about that. They didn’t want to pay the prevailing wage for men when they could hire women for much less.

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The one-room schoolhouse morphed into school districts, with professional administrators (mostly men) in charge. Women, fed up with being paid less than the few male teachers, organized unions…

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Teaching largely remains a women’s field, even though women have many more career choices. More than three-quarters of the 3.4 million public-school teachers in America are women.

And it still lacks many features of a true profession. There is no bar-like exam. No highly competitive admission to most education schools.

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And many of us still think just about anybody with a college degree can teach.

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In a report he co-authored on what America can learn from top-scoring countries, Andreas Schleicher wrote that while the U.S. may have been the first country to offer young people a free secondary education, which reaped tremendous economic benefits, our lackluster performance today can be traced, in part, to how we treat our teachers. He said, in essence, that the U.S. could improve its education system by giving its teachers good training, then letting them do their jobs like, well, professionals.

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And they also hate that, outside of the teachers lounge, they can’t raise the problem of poverty without being branded an excuse-maker. They consider poverty the elephant in the room. Not an excuse but a reality that affects test scores much more than the few bad teachers.

Even if we fired all the bad teachers tomorrow, they say, we would still have a big gap in achievement between the rich and the poor.

This was good for me, just thinking about student teaching. Fabulous.

“I could have chosen to speak to the families from behind a podium in the school auditorium,” Mr. Baum said. “But if the school wants the relationship defined in a certain way, then the school needs to make the effort.”

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For the school, the visits are intended as a welcome mat. For the families, they are a welcoming novelty. For the teachers, many of whom are in their first classroom jobs, they are an exploratory path carved under pouring rain and baking sun; past halal butchers, check-cashing joints and car repair shops; in dark, crammed apartments adorned by statues of the Virgin Mary or colorful prayer rugs.

Along the way, the young teachers tried curried chicken and cabbage, savored big chunks of watermelon with little plastic spoons and sipped from lukewarm bottles of Malta, a wheat soda that looks like stout and tastes like molasses. Crisscrossing the South Bronx by bus and on foot, they embarked on a scavenger hunt of sorts, searching for moments of connection in the 45 minutes they spent in each home.

However, even the best teachers cannot make students learn if they don’t want to. This is not an excuse; it is an explanation. Non-public schools have the right to expel students who consistently fail to do the work assigned. But public schools can’t.