What Matters Most: Teaching for America's Future

Last September, the National Commission on Teaching and America's Future, a non-partisan panel chaired by North Carolina Governor James B. Hunt, Jr., issued a "call to action" urging the American public and its education leaders to "put teach-ers and teaching at the heart of school reform." After two years of intense study within and out-side the U.S., the Commission concluded that the reform of elementary and secondary education in the U.S. will depend on how successful we are at restructuring the teaching profession. According to the Commission, restructuring is necessary if we want to improve the quality of teaching in American schools.

It came as little surprise to the commission, but is troubling just the same, that teacher education in the U.S. is poorly supported and suffers from years of neglect. Teachers' salaries lag far behind those of other professions, a chronic shortage of qualified teachers exists, teachers have little opportunity for profession-al development, classroom fund-ing is inadequate and has not kept pace with education funding in other industrialized countries, schools are not organized for success, and the country lacks well-defined standards for both students and teachers.

The driving force behind the Commission's efforts was the belief that every student has the inherent right to learn from caring and competent teachers. In the Commission's 1995 report, What Matters Most: Teaching for America's Future, Governor Hunt summarized the problem, stating that what mat-ters most to America's future "is finding the best teachers, helping them develop their skills to the greatest extent, and rewarding them for their work on behalf of children and youth." The report is aimed at policymakers, educators and analysts.

Although the push for school reform has been around for about 10 years, Ameri-ca is far from achieving the national education goals outlined in Goals 2000, the heart of President Clinton's education agenda. This agenda set ambitious goals for the country, including promoting school readiness; increasing the high school graduation rate; improving student achievement and citizenship; helping the nation's teachers acquire the knowledge and skills they need to be effective in the next century; strengthening mathematics and science education; improving adult literacy and lifelong learning; ensuring that schools are free of guns, drugs and violence; and promoting school/parent partnerships. Goals 2000, formerly America 2000, helped to change our thinking about education and how to improve it.

Many promising reform measures, however, have died in their tracks or have had little, if any, influence beyond the local community. Even successful programs cannot be replicated if schools lack the necessary know-how and resources to bring them to life. The commission summed up the problem this way:

On the whole, the school reform move-ment has ignored the obvious: What teachers know and can do makes the crucial difference in what children learn. And the ways school systems organize their work makes a big difference in what teachers can accomplish. New courses, tests and curriculum reforms can be important starting points, but they are meaningless if teachers cannot use them well. Policies can only improve schools if the people in them are armed with the knowledge, skills and supports they need. Student learning in this country will improve only when we focus our efforts on improving teaching.

An adequately prepared teaching force should be at the center of all reform efforts. Unfortunately, this is often overlooked. Student achievement hinges on having knowledgeable, highly trained teachers. A public agenda poll last year clearly supports this basic assumption. When asked, "What is the most impor-tant thing public schools need in order to help students learn?," the answer was overwhelmingly, "good teachers." Nearly 90 percent of Americans, according to a Gallup Poll, believe a world-class education system is critical to the nation's future. As former Secretary of Education Richard Riley once said, "Teachers must be [equal] partners in school reform."

The Commission's report is a comprehensive plan for improving the teaching profession through recruitment, preparation, licensure, professional development and support. The report includes the following set of goals, which the Commission believes will put the nation on a path to serious, long-term improvement in teaching and learning:
Unless schools and school systems are designed to fully support classroom teachers these goals will be difficult, if not impossible, to achieve and the plan, like so many other reform efforts, will be doomed to failure. At the heart of the plan is a system of true quality assurance for teaching aimed at determining what teachers should know and be able to do in order to help students succeed. The National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE), the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS) and the Interstate New Teach-er Assessment and Support Consortium (INTASC), which collectively represent millions of practitioners and policymakers, have combined to develop a set of standards for teacher education, beginning teacher licensing and advanced certification. Rigorous standards for teacher preparation, licensing and continuing professional development/board certification will be paramount in rejuvenating the teaching profession and ensuring the recognition that teachers deserve.

--Jerry Odland, Executive Director

For a copy of What Matters Most: Teaching for America's Future, write to The National Commission on Teaching and America's Future, P.O. Box 5239, Woodbridge, VA 22194-5239.