At the same time, little is done systematically to recognize, retain, and develop high-quality teachers. In fact, the prevailing norm is a classic misalignment of scarce resources. Teachers are paid increasingly higher salaries as they acquire more years of experience with little, if any, attention to their performance, special skills, or the difficulty of their particular teaching assignments. In addition, high performers are offered little in the way of a meaningful career ladder. In fact, it is entirely possible for teachers to have the same level of professional responsibility on the last day of their last year after a 20- or 30-year career as on the first day of their first year. Often, the only way to take on greater responsibilities is to leave the classroom, an ironic outcome in that working with children is exactly what attracts most teachers to the field in the first place. Moreover, given the top-down, compliance-oriented nature of most public-school bureaucracies, there are limited opportunities (outside public charter schools) for truly innovative and entrepreneurial work, precisely the type of work that is attractive to ambitious, performance-oriented people. In short, the current system does little in terms of compensation, career path, or opportunities for innovation to entice its highest performers to stay in the profession and continue to achieve strong results with our children.

The New Deal for Teachers

Some commonly proposed ideas to improve the quality of teaching in our schools are well intentioned, but untenable when scaled to the enormity of the challenge. Substantial across-the-board raises for teachers, for example, make great political rhetoric but would require extraordinary tax increases that the public is unlikely to accept. Moreover, across-the-board raises will not create the right incentives to bring high-quality people to work in the districts and to teach the subjects that need them the most.

Similarly, the notion of making education more like law or medicine–with a large body of canonical knowledge for all practitioners and the expectations of a lifetime career–makes for great talking points but ignores key differences between these professions. What’s more, many talented young people today are not looking for static careers spanning 30 years in a singular profession. The labor market is more mobile and dynamic than it was a generation ago, and public schools should embrace and exploit this trend in a search for talent, rather than resist it.

Instead, the nation needs a New Deal for teachers and the nation’s school children. Such an effort would involve more (and smarter) pay, better training and support, and increased opportunities for professional growth. It would also allow more people to come into education at different points in their careers, and it would structure the incentives to more effectively promote the goals of student achievement and educational equity. It would also involve more responsibility–namely more accountability for job performance in the service of our children.

First, we must substantially improve teacher recruitment and training by raising the bar for candidates and by creating real competition among preparation programs. The signals that a profession sends to would-be members are vital. Today, American public education sends the signal that teachers’ credentials are more important than their performance. We need a system of teacher training that is less focused on where a teacher was trained, and more interested in what a teacher knows and can do. To create this, we need to end the effective monopoly that education schools have on teacher training. Policymakers must foster a robust marketplace of providers from which schools and school districts can choose candidates. Traditional programs, as well as school-based residency initiatives like the Academy for School Leadership in Chicago, could all thrive in this new environment. Rather than common process and method, what ought to unite the American teacher-preparation system is a focus on demonstrable results in the classroom. At the same time, states ought to employ rigorous assessments–rather than today’s minimal requirements–as a predicate for teacher licensure and certification. Such standards should reflect both content knowledge and measures of teaching ability. There are few things the country could do to show more respect for teachers and the difficult work of teaching than ensuring serious training and rigorous entry requirements into the profession.

Second, once teachers enter the workforce they should have more control over their professional development. Imagine a market-based system that would provide teachers with portable vouchers that could be used for the professional development opportunities of their choosing. The result? Rather than today’s system of weak and often irrelevant training, we would have one where colleges and universities, as well as other vendors, competed for professional-development dollars based not on relationships with school district personnel but on the preferences of teachers. School districts would still need to manage some elements of teacher training to ensure cohesion across the instructional program and to ensure that sustained and intensive induction and mentoring programs are in place. But professional-development vouchers could easily support district efforts by empowering teachers to be true professionals and direct their own professional growth.

Finally, evaluation and compensation must be reoriented from often-perfunctory, input-based processes to rigorous, output-based ones that are aligned with the overall goal of the educational system–student learning. In most fields, experience counts for some aspect of base pay. But, in education, it counts for a disproportionate share. If effectiveness and equity are our goals, then pay must be differentiated to reflect variations in skill, content knowledge, the difficulty of a teaching assignment, and on-the-job performance. All differentials need not be individually based; teams of teachers, or entire schools, for instance, could be rewarded for gains in student learning. Teachers also ought to be rewarded for taking on leadership responsibilities in their schools and school districts. By building meaningful career ladders for educators, school districts could reward exceptional teachers and improve the overall work environment in schools without losing these educators to non-classroom positions.

Although student test scores remain an imperfect measurement, student performance data also can be used to more closely tie evaluation to performance. For example, student achievement data could, at the very least, be used to link decisions about when teachers can earn "tenure" or other job protections to performance in the classroom. In an influential 2006 paper for the Hamilton Project, Robert Gordon, Thomas Kane, and Douglas Staiger recommended informing tenure decisions with measures of how much teachers impact their students’ learning in the first few years of their careers. Similarly, real peer review, based on defined outcomes and objective criteria, can give teachers an opportunity to collectively evaluate their colleagues, recognize strong performance, and counsel those who are not performing adequately out of the profession. Teachers deserve protections against unfair or capricious treatment, but their positions should not be immune from a review process that is rooted in a teacher’s impact on student achievement.

How do we jump-start this New Deal? During the second half of the twentieth century, whether it was integration, helping students with disabilities, or creating accountability systems to protect poor and minority students, the federal government was the central player. It can and must be here, too. Inertia and special-interest pressure are intense at the state level, and vested interests understandably resist many reforms. Yet the powerful effects of conditional federal aid can already be seen in a variety of other educational reforms, from special education to state standards for students. Right now, Washington spends about $3 billion on teachers, mostly through efforts to support professional development and class-size reduction. This funding has little impact and there is little attention paid to results. Instead, the federal government should invest substantially more in teachers, but use its dollars to catalyze state and local efforts to address the human-capital challenge. Rather than allowing funding to flow regardless of results, the federal government should view its role as more akin to that of a venture capital fund and use its dollars to leverage reform. Federal dollars alone cannot finance reform, but aggressive federal action can leverage state and philanthropic resources as well.

Of course, none of this is easy. Even setting aside the political hurdles posed by vested interests in the current system, serious, substantive challenges exist. Yet today’s uneven and unjust educational outcomes can no longer be tolerated, and no serious change can occur without rethinking our approach to human capital. A New Deal for teachers, one that better aligns teaching with the goals of effectiveness and equity, is what we need. Then, and only then, will every child in America–regardless of skin color or zip code–have access to what should be their birthright: excellent teachers, an excellent education, and an equal chance in life.