We have not flinched when it comes to addressing issues of standards for teaching, of rewarding good teachers and weeding out bad ones, or of dealing with schools of education that do not make the grade. We have focused on what it would take to ensure that every child has access to caring and competent teachers who can teach for the much higher standards that students now need to survive. We have found that, as a nation, we have a great deal of work to do. In the U.S., we have invested in a large regulatory apparatus for managing schools rather than in teachers themselves. They complete an undergraduate degree, sometimes with two majors, in their teaching field followed by two to three years of graduate study in education.
Teachers usually receive pay comparable to engineers.
Teachers receive extensive mentoring in their first year of teaching and have 15 to 20 hours a week throughout their careers to work together on refining lessons, improving curriculum, solving school problems, and learning from one another. By contrast, we found that, while there are a great many wonderful, highly skilled teachers in American schools, there are also a great many who have been systematically deprived of the knowledge and the conditions they need to teach well. We are persuaded that this is the most important problem keeping us from meeting our National Education Goals. This is not just a problem in poor communities. This occurs even though this nation produces more teachers each year than it needs.