Reforming Teaching: Are We Missing the Boat?

By Linda Darling-Hammond & David Haselkorn

On the 1960s TV show "Gilligan's Island," one character, the Professor, was always designing ingenious approaches to improve life on the island. Why, the writer Anne Lamott has asked, didn’t he just try to fix the boat? Teaching in America seems to suffer from a similar problem.

For the last decade, we have seen tremendous ingenuity in policy responses to the demand for teachers. Alternative routes to certification have opened a talent pool of midcareer recruits, while service corps like Teach For America have appealed to academically talented recent college graduates. These programs forge tighter connections with the personnel offices of high-need districts than universities typically have, creating a direct pipeline to hard-to-staff schools.

Meanwhile, growing numbers of critics have taken aim at traditional teacher preparation, often for legitimate reasons. Too many universities still offer fragmented coursework and haphazard clinical placements, disconnected from one another. Some critics have even called for an end to preservice preparation requirements, to be replaced by greater leeway for principals in hiring and the use of student test scores to...