2003 224 pp. 5 1/2 x 8 1/4 Cloth ISBN 0-300-09741-7 $24.95

“A practical vision of how our children can get the high-quality teaching they deserve--a vision worth pondering and even implementing.”--Ted Fiske, former Education Editor of the New York Times and coauthor of When Schools Compete: A Cautionary Tale

Many of the problems afflicting American education are the result of a critical shortage of qualified teachers in the classrooms. The teacher crisis is surprisingly resistant to current reforms and is getting worse. This important book reveals the causes underlying the crisis and offers concrete, affordable proposals for effective reform.

Vivian Troen and Katherine Boles, two experienced classroom teachers and education consultants, argue that because teachers are recruited from a pool of underqualified candidates, given inadequate preparation, and dropped into a culture of isolation without mentoring, support, or incentives for excellence, they are programmed to fail. Half quit within their first five years. Troen and Boles offer an alternative, a model of reform they call the Millennium School, which changes the way teachers work and improves the quality of their teaching. When teaching becomes a real profession, they contend, more academically able people will be drawn into it, colleges will be forced to improve the quality of their education, and better-prepared teachers will enter the classroom and improve the profession.

“Why do so few people go into teaching, or once they have begun a career in public school teaching, abandon it? Kitty Boles and Vivian Troen, teachers both, investigate that question and then propose considerable and thoughtful changes that would bring great benefit to our beloved profession.”--Theodore Sizer and Nancy Faust Sizer, authors of The Students Are Watching: Schools and the Moral Contract

Vivian Troen and Katherine C. Boles co-founded the Learning/Teaching Collaborative, one of the country’s first professional development schools, and Trilemma Solutions, an educational consultancy. Boles is currently a lecturer on education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and Troen is implementing professional development school initiatives at Brandeis University.

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Reviews

"Teaching is a great job, requiring knowledge, discrimination, perspective, compassion, and an ever-inquiring mind. Why do so few such people go into teaching, or once they have begun a career in public school teaching, abandon it? Kitty Boles and Vivian Troen, teachers both, investigate that question and then propose considerable and thoughtful changes which would bring great benefit to our beloved profession."--Theodore Sizer & Nancy Faust Sizer, authors of The Students Are Watching: Schools and the Moral Contract

"It's easy to be depressed about the condition of teaching in America's public schools, and learning how it all came about does little to ease the pain. But Vivian Troen and Katherine Boles go one step further and offer a practical vision of how our children can get the high-quality teaching they deserve. Their vision is worth pondering--and even implementing."--Ted Fiske, Former Education Editor of the New York Times and author, with Helen F. Ladd, of When Schools Compete: A Cautionary Tale

“For well over a century, teachers have remained second-class citizens in the world of professionals--low pay, poor working conditions, and no path to career advancement. But why and at what cost? In their compelling analysis, Boles and Troen explore both the problem and the price that students and society pay. Their wise diagnosis and imaginative plan of action make this engaging book essential reading for all who would take school reform seriously.”--Susan Moore Johnson, Harvard Graduate School of Education

"Any theory of change regarding public education must focus on the classroom as the unit of change. Through their thoughtful consideration of the 21st century classroom teacher, Troen and Boles urge us to revisit and reinvent the job definition of this critical agent of change."--Diana Lam, Deputy Chancellor for Teaching and Learning, New York City Department of Education

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“Quality education begins with quality teaching, but teaching is a job that fewer and fewer people of quality want to do. Why are fewer good people attracted to teaching? Why are they so poorly trained? Why do so many good people leave?”

YOUR CHILDREN ARE NOT GETTING THE TEACHERS THEY DESERVE

New Book Shows Why the Teacher Crisis is Even Worse Than You Think

And What Can Be Done About It

Whether you live in a comfortable suburb, in a troubled urban neighborhood, or in rural America, if your children attend a public school, they are probably not getting the education they deserve. Mountains of statistics have documented America’s educational slide, and billions of dollars have been spent on school reform efforts that have failed. Faced with an unprecedented shortage of teachers, we are spending millions more to recruit bodies to fill our nation’s struggling classrooms.

In Who’s Teaching Your Children?, veteran teachers and education reformers Vivian Troen and Katherine C. Boles argue that school reform initiatives will continue to fail until we address the critical problem of the quality of teaching. Teaching in America has deteriorated for decades to reach a low point unmatched since the era of the one-room schoolhouse. Children are paying a terrible price, yet serious steps that could improve the quality of teaching are largely absent from the reform agenda.

This is not a book that blames teachers. Troen and Boles show how teachers are caught in a three-armed vortex that makes their jobs nearly impossible. First, teaching fails to draw enough academically able students. Second, our system prepares those less-able students poorly for the job. Third and perhaps most important, the professional life new teachers enter is isolating, unsupportive, and destructive of excellence and creativity. We will never improve public education in America, Troen and Boles argue, until we overhaul the very nature of the teacher’s job. Recruiting more unqualified teachers and feeding them into a pipeline that constantly hemorrhages its most talented people is today’s recipe for educational disaster.

Who’s Teaching Your Children? looks at the history of teaching in America to find out how we got to this lamentable point and proposes a concrete, specific plan for solving the problem. Troen and Boles’s plan, called the Millennium School, utterly restructures the profession of teaching. It creates a real career ladder that rewards excellence and ambition with both increased salary and increased responsibility. (Rather than leaving teaching for administrative posts or for other fields, the most skilled, educated, and experienced teachers will become Chief Instructors, responsible for supervising teams of teachers and overseeing the training and development of less experienced teachers.) It promotes a collaborative culture that makes everyone working in a school accountable for the quality of teaching. And it forges a new relationship between the elementary school and the university to ensure that on-the-job training and professional development genuinely help shape better teachers.

Who’s Teaching Your Children? also shows why decades of reform efforts that don’t directly address the problem of teacher quality have not improved American education. Smaller classes headed by inadequate teachers will not produce better students. Administering more high-stakes tests does not change the level of student achievement. (As a rancher once said, “You can’t fatten cattle by weighing them more often.”). Students will be penalized unfairly by high-stakes testing programs until teachers are capable of teaching the required material well. Charter schools have a spotty record of improving learning, tend to be even more expensive that regular public schools, and have in many cases proven disastrous. Vouchers offer escape from bad schools for a small number of students but have largely failed to improve achievement and pose severe risks to traditional public schools. The increasingly popular “teacher proof” curricula, designed to impart learning no matter how unskilled the teacher, are better than no guidance at all for the struggling leaders of many of today’s classrooms, but they certainly don’t amount to genuine training, mentoring, and development. Troen and Boles dissect these and many other initiatives that have failed to turn the floundering ship of American education around. These efforts are Band-Aids, they argue, while the underlying malady of poor teaching continues to fester.

Full of genuinely shocking stories from inside school culture, this is a book that will make the most complacent parent and the most jaded reformer take notice. Would Troen and Boles’s Millennium School finally bring the dramatic, systemic improvement parents, politicians, and industry leaders all know we need? Their proposal is so clearly presented, any interested citizen can understand it. Their rigorous arguments are based on years of experience in the classroom and on meticulous scholarship. Their radical plan will not be expensive, say the authors, and they show where the money would come from and why our current spending is largely wasted. Who’s Teaching Your Children? challenges us all to face squarely the magnitude of the problem we face and its ramifications for the future of our nation. We must act now and with resolve, Troen and Boles argue, if we hope to break the cycle that degrades our public education system generation after generation.

For more information or to arrange an interview with the authors, please contact: Liz Pelton, 410-467-0989, lizpelton@aol.com.

The Trilemma Dysfunction

Troen and Boles identify three problems at the root of America’s educational decline. The three problems are intertwined, creating a persistent cycle of dysfunction that overwhelms school reform efforts and dooms them to fail. The authors call this cycle the Trilemma Dysfunction.

Less Able Beginners

When teaching was one of the few jobs open to educated women and minorities, the quality of those entering the field was demonstrably higher. With more opportunities available, fewer of the best candidates are choosing to become teachers. Thirty percent of our new teachers scored in the bottom quartile on their college entrance exams. Talented students look for careers that offer opportunities for growth, rewarding work environments, and comfortable salaries, and teaching has sunk to the bottom of the list. For many veteran teachers, opportunities in other fields beckon. Those who leave and retire are often replaced by less talented novices who don’t have other choices. Troen and Boles argue that good teaching requires immense technical knowledge, intellectual rigor, and skill. Far too many of the candidates entering the profession are not capable of meeting that standard.

Poor Training and Little Support

The decline in the quality of candidates would be less devastating if teacher training provided academic rigor, excellent preparation for the classroom, and screening to eliminate those unsuitable for the job. If well-prepared candidates then received additional support and opportunities to improve their skills once they started work, our crisis would not be so profound. But teacher training is hopelessly inadequate, Troen and Boles argue, ensuring that many children are taught poorly and that many new teachers become disheartened and abandon the profession. And a growing number of teachers are barely trained at all. Recruitment programs offer crash courses then send teachers into the classroom to sink or swim at the expense of children’s learning. As many as 30 percent of teachers don’t meet the minimal certification standards required by their states. More than 50,000 people who lack training for their jobs enter teaching every year.

Unacceptable Professional Life

American teachers are poorly paid compared to their counterparts around the world, and low pay contributes to the lack of qualified teachers. But those who leave the field because of low pay are a minority. Troen and Boles explain how the lack of opportunity for real advancement, the isolationist culture, the pressure to conform, and the lack of respect make teaching an unattractive job. Teachers also lack resources (what other workers in our post-millennial world have such limited access to telephones, fax machines, personal computers, even copy machines?), and supplies (they spend their own money to buy them). Most important, they lack a work environment that values and promotes excellence, sharing of knowledge, and real professional development.

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