This is the wrong sort of regulation. This is not pie in the sky. William Sanders of the University of Tennessee has developed a technique that uses careful statistical analysis to identify the gains that students make during a school year and then estimate the effects of individual teachers on student progress. This technique allows policymakers, taxpayers, and parents to see for themselves how much teachers are helping students to learn. Yet few states focus their teacher-quality strategies on results.
Research finds no reliable link between pedagogical training and classroom success.
But this is not surprising. Insofar as there are links between teacher characteristics and classroom effectiveness, the strongest of these involve verbal ability and subject-matter knowledge. The time has come to consider radically different policies to boost the quality of teaching in U.S. schools. The teaching profession should be deregulated, entry into it should be widened, and personnel decisions should be decentralized to the school level, the teacher's actual workplace. Trading accountability for autonomy does not mean sloughing off all regulation.