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Wanted:
Two million energetic, articulate, intelligent professionals

We're looking for student-centered teachers who know their subject areas, understand child development, thrive on creative chaos, arbitrate disputes, respect everyone, juggle multiple tasks, are capable of navigating in technological worlds, and work well with colleagues, parents, the business community, service organizations, organized labor, church groups, administrators, students, social service agencies, and others. Candidates should be well-versed in research-based school reform strategies including, but not limited to, cooperative learning, multicultural approaches in the classroom, developmentally appropriate practices, school-to-work initiatives, experiential learning, community service, multiple intelligences, conflict resolution, and parent involvement. Master's degree and minimum of one year professional or supervised experience required.

Nearly three million women and men teach more than 50 million students in America's K-12 schools. In the next 10 years, about two million more teachers will be hired. Will these new teachers—and those who are in the classrooms today—be prepared to meet the needs of an increasingly diverse student population and the demands of increasingly vocal disparate groups? Perhaps, but only if teacher education and professional development efforts address some of the issues that persist.

Teacher education, long the stepchild in education reform efforts, is undergoing the glare of national attention. "I urge sustained attention to the task of preparing America's future teachers," U.S. Secretary of Education Richard Riley said in his 1997 "State of American Education" address. Riley decried the status of teacher education, noting deficiencies in recruiting—both in general terms, and of minority candidates in particular—in underfunded and undervalued schools of education, and in the lack of mentoring offered new teachers in America's schools.

"We will never have 'A' students," the secretary said, "if we can only give ourselves a 'C' as a nation when it comes to preparing Tomorrow's Teachers. We cannot lower our standards—as we have in the past—to meet the growing demand for new teachers."

In a two-year study of teaching and teacher preparation, the National Commission on Teaching and America's Future identified some disturbing barriers to sound teaching and learning, including:

The commission calls for widespread and systemic changes in teacher preparation, standards, recruitment, and professional development. "We propose an audacious goal for America's future," write the authors of What Matters Most: Teaching for America's Future. "Within a decade—by the year 2006—we will provide every student in America with what should be his or her educational birthright: access to competent, caring, qualified teaching in schools organized for success."

The tools, strategies, and knowledge to reach that goal, the commission maintains, are all in place. "Common sense suffices," the commission says. "American students are entitled to teachers who know their subjects, understand their students and what they need, and have developed the skills required to make learning come alive."

In What Matters Most, the commission offers five major recommendations:

  1. Get serious about standards, for both students and teachers
  2. Reinvent teacher preparation and professional development
  3. Fix teacher recruitment and put qualified teachers in every classroom
  4. Encourage and reward teacher knowledge and skill
  5. Create schools that are organized for student and teacher success

The status of teaching in America is not a new issue, nor is the critical analysis of teacher performance, education, and preparation. When the Soviets launched Sputnik in 1957, American policymakers looked to education and teachers to provide leadership in the space chase. A quarter of a century later, the release of A Nation at Risk launched a new bevy of criticisms and initiatives, some of them aimed at teacher education and teacher effectiveness.

While critics through the years have taken aim at teaching effectiveness, development, and preparation, many of the reform initiatives of the past quarter-century have focused on increased academic standards, parent involvement, schoolwide improvement, and other efforts. But the focus on effective teaching for student success is relatively new in educational research. "Schools can never be more effective than the quality of their teachers," write the editors of the Handbook of Research on Teacher Education. "Since the 1950s, a number of federal initiatives have sought to make schools more effective while circumventing teacher development by relying on textbooks, curriculum packages, television, school reorganization, parental involvement, testing, and instructional processes that were supposed to be teacher-proof. Although hundreds of millions of dollars were expended in developing such resources and strategies, attempts to improve schools are only now refocusing on the quality of teachers and teaching."

Writing in Education Week, John Goodlad noted: "How is it that we neglect our teachers and, therefore, our children and the public purpose of schooling? Three major ways come immediately to mind: the relatively unchanging circumstances of teaching, our persisting images of what teaching in schools requires, and the ill-conceived routes to teaching these circumstances and images sustain."

Yet Goodlad and his colleagues have found in extensive research that future teachers "were innocent victims" of a system that does not meet their needs—nor those of their future students—well. And, he notes, future teachers are willing to make the necessary sacrifices that would enhance their education and improve their effectiveness with students. "Most would have welcomed a less crowded, less hurried program, particularly involving more time in field and practice situations accompanied by guided reflection," he writes. "Few were put off by the suggestion of an additional year to facilitate this—so long as the requirements are made clear at the outset."

In the increasingly diverse classrooms of today's schools, reform efforts must focus on the teacher and her ability to address the individual learning styles and needs of a rich mix of children. "Teaching diverse learners to perform in these more challenging ways," argues researcher Linda Darling-Hammond, "requires changes that cannot be 'teacher-proofed' through new textbooks, curriculum mandates, or tests. As state after state has sought to re-create schools so that they can meet 21st-century demands, it has become apparent that their success depends fundamentally on teachers: What teachers know and can do is the most important influence on what students can learn."

One organization that has focused exclusively on teachers and teacher education is the Holmes Group, a consortium of education deans "organized around the twin goals of the reform of teacher education and the reform of the teaching profession." In 1986, the Holmes Group published Tomorrow's Teachers, an outline of the group's goals for the reform of teacher education. It was followed in 1990 by Tomorrow's Schools, a detailed account of the group's vision for "professional development schools." The schools represent new educational institutions that would connect university-based education schools to public elementary and secondary schools.

In 1995, Tomorrow's Schools of Education built upon the principles and ideas promoted in the first two reports published by the Holmes Group. America's strategies for educating teachers, the group notes, are slipshod and inconsistent. "Over 1,200 institutions of higher education and a growing number of nonprofit corporations now educate teachers for work in America's schools," the report notes. "Some offer excellent preparation for those who teach. Others provide shoddy preparation that angers and embarrasses those who care deeply about the minds and welfare of America's young."

The Homes Group calls upon its 250 member schools of education to take the lead in reform and to:

In some ways, current teacher recruitment and retention practices perpetuate the inequalities that persist in American education. When faced with shortages of teachers, administrators and policymakers have typically lowered standards to fill positions. "As teacher demand is growing, and as standards for teachers are being raised, the qualifications and abilities of teachers in advantaged communities are becoming ever more impressive," writes Darling-Hammond. "At the same time, however, over 50,000 teachers annually have been entering teaching on emergency or temporary certificates with little or no preparation at all. Most of these underprepared entrants are hired to teach in low-income schools in central cities and poor rural areas."

As a result, urban and rural poor children are more likely to be taught by teachers who are academically unprepared to teach their subject areas and ill-prepared to meet the needs of students. "This poses the risk of heightened inequality in opportunities to learn and in outcomes of schooling—with all of the social dangers that implies—at the very time when all students need to be prepared more effectively for the greater challenges they face," Darling-Hammond notes.

The ranks of minority teachers also must be increased in America's classrooms. While the percentage of African American, Hispanic American, and other minority students has increased in the past quarter century, the percentage of minority teachers has remained steady. For example, in 1993-94, 7.4 percent of the nation's public school teachers were African American and 4.2 percent were Hispanic American. The figure for African American teachers is down from 1971, when they held 8.1 percent of the public school teaching positions.

"The shortage of Black, Hispanic, Asian, and Native American teachers is becoming increasingly evident in every region of the country; in urban, suburban, and rural school districts; and in public and private schools, colleges, and departments of education," notes the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education in a report, Recruiting Minority Teachers: A Practical Guide.

And, reports Amy Stuart Wells in Equity and Choice, there are few minorities in the pipeline for education credentials. "Of all students presently enrolled in programs leading to initial certification at the elementary level, 90 percent are White, 4.3 percent are Black, 2 percent are Hispanic, and 1.8 percent are Asian. In contrast," she notes, "93 percent of the nation's largest urban school districts maintain minority student enrollments of more than 70 percent."

There is much more involved in educating, recruiting, and retaining minority teachers than providing role models for minority youth. Minority teachers also provide inroads for majority teachers into the experiences, cultures, and backgrounds of increasingly diverse children in schools across the country. "A society that reflects the full participation of all its citizens will be difficult to accomplish if only one in 20 teachers is a member of a minority group," write the authors of New Strategies for Producing Minority Teachers. "At this rate, the average child will have only two minority teachers—out of about 40—during his or her K-12 school years."

American schools have changed dramat ically in the last quarter-century, as have the neighborhoods and communities that support education. To reach students on individual levels, to consider their diverse backgrounds, and to address their unique learning styles will require teachers of significant intelligence, empathy, and understanding. In policy terms, notes Darling-Hammond, it's time to build the teaching corps from the bottom up rather than the top down.

"Reforms of teaching," she says, "pose an alternate para digm. They emphasize bottom-up strategies that build knowledge and capacity within the ranks of teachers and schools, betting on people rather than on bureaucratic systems as the source of improved productivity. They seek forms of accountability that will focus attention on 'doing the right things' rather than 'doing things right.' As such, they demand changes in much existing educational policy, in current school regulations, and in management structures."

Staff development and schools of education programs cannot be cast in a mold and assumed to satisfy all the needs of all the teachers everywhere. The assistance that teachers and students receive should correspond to the communities in which they work, the students they teach, and the resources available to them. What works in central Seattle may not work in suburban Boise or rural McGrath, Alaska. In rural areas, note Mary Queitzsch and Karen Hahn in Great Expectations: Preparing Rural Teachers for Educational Reform, teachers and the communities in which they work must form links to universities to pave the way for reform efforts. "Great expectations of rural teachers implies that they are in a lifelong learning mode—on a quest for more knowledge," the authors write. "Great expectations also implies the need for collaboration among community, universities, and teachers to actively engage in educational reform."

To reform the ways of teaching and teacher preparation is a complex task that involves fundamental changes in ways of thinking about, engaging with, and guiding young people in their learning. It is, for many educators and reformers, at the heart of improving schools and preparing students for the challenges and opportunities that await them.

"There is a serious crisis in education," writes bell hooks in Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. "Students often do not want to learn and teachers do not want to teach. More than ever before in the recent history of this nation, educators are compelled to confront the biases that have shaped teaching practices in our society and to create new ways of knowing, different strategies for the sharing of knowledge. We cannot address this crisis if progressive critical thinkers and social critics act as though teaching is not a subject worthy of our regard."

RESOURCE NOTES: For fuller discussions of these issues see: Places Where Teachers are Taught edited by John Goodlad, Roger Soder, and Kenneth Sirotnik; Teachers for Our Nation's Schools by John Goodlad; Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom by bell hooks; Tomorrow's Schools of Education and other publications by the Holmes Group; What Matters Most: Teaching for America's Future; and Great Expectations: Preparing Rural Teachers for Educational Reform, published by the Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory.

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