01/20/04 -- The Teaching Commission, a blue-ribbon panel of 19 leaders in government, business, philanthropy, and education, announced a strategy Jan. 14 to fundamentally upgrade teaching as a profession by changing the way teachers come into the field, as well as the way they are trained, assessed, supported, and compensated.
"The quality of teachers in our schools affects every aspect of our society, from jobs to national security," says commission Chair Louis V. Gerstner Jr., former chair of IBM.
According to Gerstner, "The nation will not continue to lead or to create new jobs if we persist in viewing teaching -- the profession that makes all other professions possible -- as a second-rate occupation."
The Teaching Commission is a three-year effort funded by private donations and headquartered at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York City. Its members include former elected officials, corporate CEOs, school leaders, a teacher union president, and leaders of philanthropy and higher-education institutions.
While praising the work of the nation's many dedicated teachers, the commission report, Teaching at Risk: A Call to Action, says the current system fails both teachers and students.
The report says poor and minority students, who are often the most academically needy, tend to get the least experienced or capable teachers.
And, it says, far too many students are taught math by teachers who don't have a major or minor in that subject or science by teachers who have not sufficiently demonstrated content knowledge in that area.
Meanwhile, the most effective teachers -- those who lead, who successfully raise student achievement, and who have expertise in their subject matter -- are compensated via an antiquated, 80-year-old system that pays them the same as their least effective colleagues. "A system that does not reward excellence cannot inspire it," the report says.
Equally significant, even with new federal legislation requiring that all teachers be "highly qualified" by the 2004-05 school year, some states are actively choosing to disregard the teacher quality crisis. The report notes that many states are simply lowering the bar and overlooking the objective of the law, which is to raise student achievement for all students.
"These systemic problems prevent teachers from achieving their goals and mire educators and their students in the quicksand of the status quo," the report concludes.
"Given these challenges, it is no surprise that half of all new teachers quit after a few years, and that our students are not achieving as much as we'd like," Gerstner says.
The commission's report proposes four closely linked strategies to remedy the problems in the field:
• Compensate teachers more effectively. To help lure more good teachers into the classroom and encourage the best teachers to stay, the commission calls for pay hikes for all teachers and for teacher compensation to be linked to student performance.
The commission also advocates developing career advancement structures to raise pay for master and mentor teachers and offering premium pay for teaching in challenging neighborhoods and in subjects with teacher shortages.
The commission urges schools to rate teacher performance using a variety of techniques, including "value-added" methods that measure how individual teachers influence learning for each child.
The value-added approach takes into consideration students' past performance and eliminates factors that regularly excuse low student performance, such as poverty or family background.
• Bolster accountability in teacher education. The commission calls on college and university presidents to revamp teacher education programs and make teacher quality a priority.
The commission urges college leaders to raise standards for entry into teacher preparation, to beef up the academic content of these programs while also ensuring a connection to real practice, and to promote teaching as an exemplary career path for many more of their top students.
It urges the federal government to "tie continued funding of teacher education programs to measures of success for graduates of these programs" and emphasizes that "institutions that do not meet acceptable standards of performance should no longer continue to receive federal funding."
• Strengthen state teacher licensing and certification requirements. The report calls on state leaders to raise the passing scores required on current certification exams and to ensure that every prospective teacher passes a rigorous test of both content and essential skills.
The commission also calls on states to replace low-level basic competency tests with challenging exams that measure verbal ability and content knowledge at an appropriately high level.
In addition, in order to make the profession more attractive to a wide range of qualified candidates, it calls for streamlining the cumbersome bureaucracy that surrounds teacher licensure.
• Empower school leaders as CEOs. The report suggests that school districts give principals ultimate say over personnel decisions. In order to develop a culture of excellence, principals, in turn, must provide teachers with more opportunities to become decision makers and to benefit from mentoring and ongoing professional development known to improve classroom instruction.
The commission estimates that it would cost about $30 billion -- less than a tenth of what the nation already invests in education -- to give all teachers a 10 percent raise and to give the top half of all teachers a 30 percent incentive increase.
"These costs are significant, but the nation has always stepped forward to do what is necessary to address our top priorities, from cutting the price of prescription drugs for seniors to strengthening homeland security," Gerstner says.
Economist Eric Hanushek says investing in teaching to address student achievement problems will pay for itself. Hanushek estimates that significant improvements in education over a 20-year period could increase the gross domestic product by as much as 4 percent.
The commission intends to build partnerships with states, school districts, education organizations, policy groups, and college leaders to implement its recommendations.