By Jocelyn Huber, Director of Teacher Advocacy
As part of Education Week’s seven part series of Commentary essays on the “Futures of School Reform,” Frederick Hess, Greg Gunn, and Olivia Meek suggest that the key to improving teacher quality may be to rethink the entire profession. The authors point to the unavoidable fact that the world has changed dramatically in the past fifty years, yet the teaching profession remains stubbornly unchanged. Public schools now educate increasingly diverse student populations with student achievement goals that stretch far beyond high school graduation. Twenty-first century professions are also highly mobile and few people stay in the same job for their entire working career. Yet, the teaching profession is still designed around the image of the thirty year career teacher.
The essay’s authors suggest three ways to begin rethinking the job of the “teacher”: 1) Rethink geographical limitations and share teacher expertise through virtual-learning options; 2) Rethink tasks by dividing the labor between classroom instructors and tutors or computer-assisted instruction; And 3) Rethink who can teach by increasing the presence of volunteers in schools or even outsourcing some educational tasks.