Who's Teaching Your Children?
Why the Teacher Crisis Is Worse Than You Think and What Can Be Done About It
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- $19.99
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
Many of the problems afflicting American education are the result of a critical shortage of qualified teachers in the classrooms. The teacher crisis is surprisingly resistant to current reforms and is getting worse. This important book reveals the causes underlying the crisis and offers concrete, affordable proposals for effective reform.
Vivian Troen and Katherine Boles, two experienced classroom teachers and education consultants, argue that because teachers are recruited from a pool of underqualified candidates, given inadequate preparation, and dropped into a culture of isolation without mentoring, support, or incentives for excellence, they are programmed to fail. Half quit within their first five years. Troen and Boles offer an alternative, a model of reform they call the Millennium School, which changes the way teachers work and improves the quality of their teaching. When teaching becomes a real profession, they contend, more academically able people will be drawn into it, colleges will be forced to improve the quality of their education, and better-prepared teachers will enter the classroom and improve the profession.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Many school reform efforts are merely Band-Aids that do more harm than good and don't solve the problems they are intended to correct. According to veteran teachers Troen and Boles, "Public education has become a closed-loop system of dysfunction." The public has been inundated with critiques of education and proposals for fixing schools: conduct more testing, ax the unions, stop social promotion, raise standards, etc. However, efforts to address these problems are likely doomed to failure, say the authors, because they seldom consider the most important variable: teacher quality. This well-researched, thoughtful proposal for an overhaul of America's public education system identifies three major problems with the teaching profession: not enough academically able students are being drawn to teaching; teacher preparation programs are inadequate; and teachers' professional lives are unacceptable, "isolating" and "unsupportive." Rather than suggest radical new ideas, Troen and Boles offer a model of reform they call the "Millennium School," which gathers the best of what is known about how to transform the teaching profession and wraps it up neatly in a commonsense package. This reasoned response to the teacher crisis does not offer a quick or painless fix. It will take time, money and hard work to straighten things out. But if parents and teachers want "no child left behind," as the president proposes, Troen and Boles insist we must remedy the deep, systemic problems in the teaching profession now, before all the good teachers leave the schools.
