Press Release FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE "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: Paul Wesel, 617-522-1230, pwesel@attbi.com. WHO'S TEACHING YOUR CHILDREN? Why the Teacher Crisis is Worse Than You Think And What Can Be Done About It By Vivian Troen and Katherine C. Boles Yale University Press 224 pages ISBN 0-300-09741-7 (c) 2003 Vivian Troen, Katherine Boles; All Rights Reserved.