Three Things You Should Read

I'm going to strongly recommend two new reports out this week.

One is the final report of the Teaching Commission, an independent commission established by former IBM CEO Lou Gerstner to identify and promote reforms that modernize the way American public school teachers are prepared and hired, the conditions in which they work, and how they are paid, in order to improve results and equity for kids. To advance this end, the Teaching Commission's first report, published in 2004, called for a variety of policy reforms, including more competitive, performance-based, and market-based teacher pay; career ladders; revamping teacher education programs; raising the performance bar for becoming a teacher while streamlining red tape; and giving school leaders more authority to hire, fire, and develop staff, and holding them responsible for doing so wisely.

The new report grades the progress being made nationally towards these goals and highlights reform steps being taken by states, school districts, and organizations around the country. A companion report from the National Conference of State Legislators delves into much greater detail about the various pieces of legislation around progressive teacher reform passed in various states--a pretty long and impressive list.

In the six years I've been working in education policy, reforms to the teaching profession--particularly around competitive or performance-based pay and alternate routes--have often seemed to me to be the area in which the greatest and fastest changes are occurring. This report is well worth reading for anyone working on these issues.

(The Teaching Commission's final report is dedicated to former Teaching Commission Executive Director Gaynor McCown and former AFT President Sandra Feldman, two amazing women who I deeply respect, and who, in their different ways, worked dilligently and intelligently to modernize the teaching profession and improve education for children in the United States. Both, sadly and far too soon, died of cancer in 2005.)

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A second report worth reading this week is the National Institute for Early Education Research (NIEER)'s 2005 State Preschool Yearbook. The state preschool yearbook is a valuable reference for anyone working with early childhood education issues. It chronicles national trends in publicly-funded preschool access and quality, and grades the states on access and quality measures. For 2005, the picture is mixed, with some progress and bright spots, but stagnation in many places. Despite dramatically increased attention to the importance of early childhood, states still spend barely one percent as much money for preschool as they do for K-12 education, access is poor in many states, and quality is often low, too. To learn how your state is doing, read the report.

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Finally, I want to make a plug for the Spring 2006 issue of AFT's magazine, American Educator. I think it's one of the best magazines related to education that not anywhere near enough people know about or read. It has interesting articles on a wide variety of education-related topics that don't conform to any single pre-set ideology or position. And, they get excellent writers to contribute. (I'm particularly partial to an article by Azar Nafisi, the author of Reading Lolita in Tehran, that they published in 2004 about why women's rights aren't just for westerners.) This quarter's issue, now available on the AFT website, features an essay by E.D. Hirsch, excerpted from his new book, The Knowledge Deficit, about why a knowledge-rich core curriculum is important for all children.