Teach Effectively!

In his column under the headline “Our Schools Must Do Better,” Bob Herbert of the New York (US) Times issued a clear and explicit call for greater effectiveness in education. Such calls are common, but Mr. Herbert goes further than many of them. He does not simply lament the situation, but makes some concrete suggestions.

What’s needed is a wholesale transformation of the public school system from the broken-down postwar model of the past 50 or 60 years. The U.S. has not yet faced up to the fact that it needs a school system capable of fulfilling the educational needs of children growing up in an era that will be at least as different from the 20th century as the 20th was from the 19th.

Mr. Herbert presents Professor Thomas Kane’s recommendation about systematically (a) identifying effective teachers during the early stages of their careers and (b) mining the plethora of alternative schools to determine the characteristics of those that have proven effective so that they can be emulated.

We need other important changes (e.g., explicit teacher preparation in the use of evidence-based practices, for example), but these two are worth considering. Thanks to Mr. Herbert’s column, they are now on the table.

Link to Mr. Herbert’s column.