Katherine Boles and Vivian Troen, Yale University Press
March 2003
Katherine Boles of the Harvard ed school and Vivian Troen of Brandeis co-wrote this 220-page book, subtitled "Why the teacher crisis is worse than you think and what can be done about it." Their diagnosis is wholly familiar if largely true: underqualified candidates, weak training, a "culture of isolation" in the schools, etc. A bunch of familiar policy cures (e.g. smaller classes, high-stakes testing, school choice, "teacher-proof" curricula) are then examined and dismissed. That enables the authors to offer their own cure-all, at least for the elementary grades, a design that they term the "Millennium School" and that they claim would "utterly restructure the profession of teaching." Said design incorporates a number of promising features and is surely worth trying somewhere, though I'd want to see a lot of evidence before treating it as a sure route to placing highly qualified teachers in every American classroom. You may want to have a look. The book is full of earnestness. It's also about 2/3 full of conventional thinking about teaching and teachers. The final third, however, is worthwhile. The ISBN is 0300097417, Yale is the publisher and more information can be found at http://www.harvard.com/cgi-bin/newarriv.cgi?isbn=0300097417&ver=sc.
