Book Argues for How to Improve the Teaching Corps

One of the bolder ideas is to 'deselect' the field's bottom 5 to 10 percent.

A new book stitches together ideas—some of which may be controversial—for building an improved corps of teachers from the time they start their professional training until they retire.

“Research clearly shows that teacher quality is the most important schooling factor influencing student achievement,” write Dan Goldhaber and Jane Hannaway, the editors of Creating a New Teaching Profession , which is being published this month by the Urban Institute, a research organization based in Washington.

Yet, they add, “the myriad systems that govern the quality of teachers today are too often disconnected, incoherent, and out of step with the market mechanisms that govern...