There was an opinion piece in the New York Times on Sunday by Thomas Friedman entitled Teaching for America. On the front page on the Times website, the article title was Teaching to Win.

Friedman’s article is supportive of current reform efforts, and the charge that the nations schools have put us in a hole (according to Friedman). Friedman suggests that the solution to our educational demise to raise the profession of teaching by rewarding excellence in teaching. Arne Duncan, Secretary of Education, is beginning a “national teacher campaign” designed to recruit new talent.

Friedman says this about the current situation:

Duncan, with bipartisan support, has begun several initiatives to energize reform — particularly his Race to the Top competition with federal dollars going to states with the most innovative reforms to achieve the highest standards. Maybe his biggest push, though, is to raise the status of the teaching profession. Why?

Tony Wagner, the Harvard-based education expert and author of “The Global Achievement Gap,” explains it this way. There are three basic skills that students need if they want to thrive in a knowledge economy: the ability to do critical thinking and problem-solving; the ability to communicate effectively; and the ability to collaborate.

If you look at the countries leading the pack in the tests that measure these skills (like Finland and Denmark), one thing stands out: they insist that their teachers come from the top one-third of their college graduating classes. As Wagner put it, “They took teaching from an assembly-line job to a knowledge-worker’s job. They have invested massively in how they recruit, train and support teachers, to attract and retain the best.”

These are not new ideas. Actually Colleges of Education have been dealing with these issues for decades, and have indeed put into practice many of the suggestions that the current reformers are making. Teacher education does indeed focus the preparation of teachers where it should be, and that is the classroom working with experienced mentor teachers. It’s one thing to talk about a “national academy of teaching” when in fact teaching and teacher preparation takes place locally in schools with real teachers, and professors who collaborate with mentor teachers to work with teacher education students.

Our work at GSU in alternative teacher education (ATE) and in the TEEMS program that grew out of our research in ATE, a constructivist and humanistic model engaged student interns in a field based training program. Our goal was to create an environment in which interns worked with each other in teams to develop the highest level of professional development and provide opportunities for creative teaching, and reflective practice.

Teaching for America, Friedman’s title for his article, is a kind of nationalistic mantra, and one that differs quite a bit from the notion of Teaching in America. Much of the reform going on today centers in on the connection between student achievement and the economic prosperity of our nation. The current recession was not caused by low test scores in the nations schools, but by a combination of factors quite distant from schools: Wall Street, Banks, Fraudulent Mortgages, Government Spending, and Two Wars.   The reform efforts today are rooted in efforts to use student achievement as the baseline for assessing schools and teachers.   If you want to find an interesting account of Teaching in America you might want to read Professor Charles Hutcheson’s research and subsequent book.

The Race to the Top Fund ($4.5 billion) created a frenzy of proposal writing in most of the states resulting in only 12 “winners.” Teaching should not be about winning some kind of race, but should be characterized by work that opens doors, and uncovers opportunities for students.