Two perspectives on teaching as a profession offer an interesting contrast. One side focuses on teachers from a political perspective, while the other envisions transforming teaching into a true profession.

American schools are in a constant, unending race to recruit and then retain some 300,000 teachers annually. Given that U.S. colleges issue a grand total of perhaps 1.5 million four-year diplomas a year across all majors and disciplines, even non-mathematicians can see that the K-12 schools are seeking to recruit about one in five new college…

"Human capital" is quickly becoming the new site-based management, a popular strategy from the 1980s and 1990s that sought to increase autonomy in schools and spread decision making more widely. While few are sure what human capital means, everyone craves it, has a model to deliver it, and is quick to tout its restorative powers. It is…

The vast majority of public employees--including teachers--are enrolled in defined-benefit pension plans. These plans are usually the product of state legislation that determines eligibility, benefit formulas, employer and employee contributions, and how payments will be calculated when an employee retires or leaves the system. Once an employee…

"Human capital" is quickly becoming the new site-based management. While few are sure what it means, everyone craves it, has a model to deliver it, and is quick to tout its restorative powers. It's trendy and impressive sounding, but too often settles for recycling familiar nostrums or half-baked ideas in the guise of new jargon. To…

The state of teaching and teacher education is the result of more than a century of compromises and adjustments demanded by the exigencies of another era. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the teaching profession was designed to match the rapid expansion of schooling. It relied on a captive pool of inexpensive, educated female labor…

Some four decades after the advent of collective bargaining in public education, the labor agreements it has produced now touch virtually all aspects of school district operations, from how teachers are paid and assigned to how they can be evaluated, how or whether they can be disciplined or fired, when and where they complete professional…

The central premise underlying teacher certification is that--no matter what their qualifications are--anyone who has not completed the specified training is unsuited to enter a classroom and must be prohibited from applying for a job. Presumably, the danger is that, in a moment of weakness, a school official otherwise will mistakenly hire such an…