Upgrading the teaching profession

A new report on improving the US teaching corps has recently come out, as well as a recent EdWeek article summarizing its findings and the debate surrounding its release. The report was issued by a diverse, high-level panel run by Strategic Management of Human Capital, a project of the Consortium for Policy Research in Education. The report, which emphasizes the importance of reconstructing the teaching profession from the ground up, calls for actions such as making entrance to the profession more selective and removing low-performing teachers from the classroom. While the panel that produced the report included some teacher’s union representatives, the report itself has come under fire as unfairly targeting teachers and inadequately representing their perspective. Controversy aside, we note the striking similarities of many of these findings in this report to those of the 2007 McKinsey Report, which proffered the mantra “the quality of an education system cannot exceed the quality of its teachers.”