The National Commission on Teaching and America's Future
January 2003
This bulky, pompous tome from the National Commission on Teaching and America's Future (NCTAF) - its first major report since Tom Carroll took the helm from Linda Darling-Hammond - was described in initial press accounts as a recasting of the country's teaching problem into one of turnover and attrition. [See one example at http://www.startribune.com/stories/1592/3620590.html.] That would have at least been interesting, coming from an outfit that has long emphasized preparation and licensure. And there's a veneer of accuracy to those reports, as NCTAF declares in these (150+) pages that, "In most cases poor school performance is being driven not by an insufficient supply of teachers, but by extremely high turnover rates that stem from chronic, unaddressed conditions in the schools." When you dig under the surface, however, into the Commission's three recommended "strategies" for solving this problem, we find the same old NCTAF. Beyond the tautology that better schools will tend to attract and keep better teachers, this new bottle is full of familiar grape juice: tighter regulation of entry and training, mandatory accreditation and certification, heavy reliance on National Board recognition, etc. Though the words say it's "time to abandon the futile debate over 'traditional' vs. 'alternative' preparation for teachers," what the Commission really means is that the alternative approach should vanish. Note, too, that its conviction that turnover in teaching is a bad thing flies in the face of the view of teaching that says short-termers should be welcomed and made the most of in ways that complement the work of career educators. You may not want this burden on your bookshelf - chances are that you have innumerable earlier NCTAF tomes - but you can get a copy by surfing to http://www.nctaf.org/dream/dream.html. For two other astute analyses of this report, surf to http://members.aol.com/educationintel/communique.htm (for Mike Antonucci's deconstruction of the NCTAF analysis) and http://www.uidaho.edu/~jwenders/Essays%20In%20Persuasion/New2/Retention--msw.htm (where you'll find a critique by economist John Wenders).
