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One Day asked: Imagine no barriers. No limits. How would you reinvent the profession of teaching? Your fellow alums answer.

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Imagine no barriers. No limits. How would you reinvent the profession of teaching?

This spring, One Day asked Teach For America alumni to answer the question above. Many of you—from a broad swath of corps years and careers—wrote in. We’ve highlighted several voices that represent a cross section of the innovative ideas and insights you shared.

A New Roadmap to Teacher Quality

By Timothy Daly (Baltimore ’99)

Our teacher quality system is broken. Without a radical, comprehensive approach to improving teacher quality, the vast inequities in student achievement and widespread failures that plague our public schools today will persist indefinitely. Changing this reality requires a wholesale realignment of every segment of the pathway into teaching, so that each part points to the same overriding goal: a highly effective teacher for every student.

Currently, the pathway into teaching is poorly marked, rife with obstacles, and fraught with detours. No wonder only a fraction of the talented individuals interested in teaching make it to high-need schools.

Envision a future in which the institutions, policies, and systems that are chiefly responsible for putting a quality teacher into every classroom are tightly aligned to just that objective. These changes cannot be incremental and careful, but must be seismic and holistic.

Expanding entry points and removing deterrents for talented people to become teachers. Today, most urban districts generate a small pool of candidates for each position and fail to take action on candidates until the best of the group are gone. In desperation, they hire whoever is left. We can expand applicant pools by creating high-quality alternate-route programs in every district. Such programs can recruit from among the ranks of top professionals, not just the ranks of ed school graduates, and have a higher likelihood of attracting people of color and men to the profession. Additionally, new teachers need the potential to make more money sooner. An exceptional teacher should be able to reach the top of the salary scale within approximately eight years. Currently, it takes as many as 30.

State certification requirements should uphold high standards without preventing individuals with strong content knowledge from teaching high-need subjects. A former engineer has the content knowledge to teach math.

Purposeful and flexible teacher placement. In many districts, teachers are treated as interchangeable parts and placed in schools without regard to the local instructional team and its needs. Successful enterprises do not operate that way. Teacher placements should always occur with the consent of the teacher and the receiving school. We must leave behind the days of forcing teachers into any available vacancy.

Improving teacher preparation pathways. We must respond specifically to the needs of low-income schools and of teachers working in challenging environments. For example, we have a desperate shortage of math and special education teachers, but many preparation programs continue to focus on elementary certificates. To retain state accreditation, a preparation program should be required to produce the teachers that districts actually need.

Strengthening the teacher tenure process. Tenure should only be awarded after rigorous assessment of a teacher’s abilities and effectiveness—not as a matter of course. Teachers should actively apply for tenure and be reviewed by a committee of peers and administrators who use data gathered through multiple unannounced observations by master teachers. Additionally, because effective teachers help students grow, it is appropriate to consider evidence of student growth as a central element of tenure conferral. Only accomplished educators should retain the right to work with our students.

Until the achievement gap closes, there is much to be done. The civil right of all students to a quality education drives us forward.

Daly is president of The New Teacher Project, a national nonprofit that works with districts and states to implement many of these ideas.

Closing the Gap on Teacher Accountability

By Jennifer Green (G.N.O. ’91) and Christina Hall

The 2006 discussion paper “Identifying Effective Teachers Using Performance on the Job” (Gordon, Kane, Staiger) states that four years of excellent teaching can close the gap between poor students of color and their white suburban counterparts. If this is true, then why haven’t we closed the gap? Two fundamental issues impede our progress: scarcity of educator expertise and a lack of accountability for results.

In our roles as senior administrators in the Baltimore City Public School System, we annually tracked disaggregated student-performance data back to the individual teacher. Over and over, we saw teachers teaching the same children within the same school getting strikingly different student performance results. We also observed what happens to teachers who fail to move student performance at all—nothing.

To reinvent the profession of teaching is to do the obvious: equip teachers with the knowledge and skills needed to teach their students. We must rethink our approach to teacher training, working backwards from existing research studies about what works in the classroom, one discipline at a time.

Only then can we hold teachers accountable—and reward them—for achieving one year of student performance gains for one year of instruction. More radically, we can tie teacher certification to student performance. In other words, some time during their training, aspiring teachers should have to demonstrate that they can actually do the job for which they’re preparing. This could be accomplished by having aspiring teachers work with small groups of students and ensuring that they move those students to a certain level. Candidates who don’t sufficiently increase student performance don’t get certified. Once teachers are certified, they should continue to be on the hook to deliver results, and should be rewarded significantly when they do so.

No teacher, however, should be an island of best practice amid a sea of poor adult performance. To address this, compensation incentives should be provided both at the individual and the team level to reinforce the idea that teachers are responsible for their own students’ performance as well as for cultivating a professional, results-driven relationship with their colleagues. In an elementary school, for example, the third grade team should receive additional compensation if the data for third graders improves. In a high school, the English department should be compensated when their 11th graders’ scores increase on the highstakes English exam.

Teachers must be equipped to provide excellent teaching to each of their students, every day. They must also be accountable to their students, and to one another, for their performance. It is only through a combined focus oneducator expertise and accountability that we will truly begin to meet the demands of No Child Left Behind for every child in America.

Green and Hall are co-directors of The Urban Teacher Institute.

From Practitioners to Professionals

By Kilian Betlach (Bay Area ’02)

As it stands today, teaching is not a profession. It is a neverending entry-level vocation, divorced from foundational understandings of training, accountability, and advancement. If we are to enact meaningful reform, we must rescue teaching from its status as vocation and volunteerism, and recast it as a profession of rigor, creativity, and unlimited impact.

Training. It is not uncommon to hear teachers dismiss their credentialing programs as useless and ineffective. Doctors, pilots, and plumbers are not expected, as teachers are, to learn their profession on the run, by trial and error, by searching for ideas on the Internet, or by attending disparate workshops. Traditional-route programs train teachers on generic skill-sets insufficient for the incredible language, ethnic, and socioeconomic diversity found within urban classrooms. Yet, alternative-route programs require prohibitive amounts of on-the-job learning that is impractical and frequently ineffective.

We need a third way, one built on the medical residency model, combining training in highly specialized skills with the time needed to fully combine theory and praxis. All prospective urban educators need time to learn from and work with a proven mentor, develop their teaching in meaningful and accountable ways, and engage in coursework that acknowledges and reflects the differences between teaching in Marin and teaching in West Oakland.

These resident teachers would work for an academic year with an attending teacher, immediately participating in all professional responsibilities and eventually owning complete units of study. This more authentic model rescues student-teaching from unaccountable contexts of summer school and end-of-year laxness and provides more comprehensive and accurate training. Perhaps most importantly, residents learn firsthand from proven attendings and see effective teaching applied in the exact context in which they will work.

Evaluation and accountability. Our profession continues to struggle with this essential understanding of our work, failing to connect compensation or even continued employment to educator effectiveness. We must institute evaluation measures that value outputs over inputs. We must develop merit pay and accountability systems that make improvement a professional imperative rather than an act of personal pride. We must invest site administration with the power to hire the teachers they want and fire those they don’t. Until then, we will continue to function less like a profession, and more like rec-league T-ball, where everyone gets to swing but no one keeps score.

Differentiated roles. We need promotions for teachers that do not require them to stop being teachers. What limitations—beyond inertia— prevent the creation of the teacher/ vice-principal, the teacher/curriculum designer, the teacher/data analyst? Such hybrid roles exist in small, isolated numbers, but more often than not, assuming greater leadership responsibilities means adding on to existing teaching responsibilities. This limits overall effectiveness and encourages martyrdom and burnout, forcing teacher-leaders to either dramatically increase their professional responsibilities or make a choice between the classroom and the front office. By seeking the creation of diverse and varied teaching positions, we expand the scope of professional development and advancement, keep talented leaders working directly with kids, and begin to address the problematic issue of mid-career teacher retention.

The achievement gap can only be closed by professionalizing teaching and eliminating the educator achievement gap—the distance between the teachers we are and the teachers our students need us to be.

Betlach has taught seventh grade structured English immersion at Lee Mathson Middle School in East San Jose, Calif., for six years. In July, he began a new role as a policy and practice associate for The Education Trust–West.