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Whereas the best public-school systems in the world—Finland, Singapore, South Korea—recruit all of their teachers from the top third or better of their college graduates, in America the majority come from the bottom two-thirds, with just 14 percent of those entering teaching each year in high-needs schools coming from the upper third. And the numbers may be getting worse. According to a recent survey conducted by McKinsey, a meager 9 percent of top-third graduates have any interest in teaching whatsoever.

teacher quality is a national priority: Educators are paid competitively; education schools are highly selective; jobs are guaranteed for those credentialed; and professional development is ample and subsidized.

“If you want to change public education, you have to do something that feels like a threat to the status quo,” says Canada. “If we don’t fight about this, if we can shake and be friends, we ain’t going to change. And if we don’t change, huge numbers of kids ain’t going to make it. There is no Superman coming to save them. All they have is us.”

content-rich guaranteed curriculum that is consistently well delivered and clear lessons that have frequent checks for understanding.

The best online learning works on a mastery-based system—where students do not advance until they have mastered a concept (as opposed to the current system where everyone moves on no matter if they have mastered the concept) and thus there are frequent check-ins to see how much a student understands and to cycle back into more learning opportunities where appropriate

ects to identify valid indicators of excellent teaching. These projects are examining the technical quality of several existing assessment instruments, and piloting early versions of new tools, from classroom evaluation tools, to pedagogical content-knowledge tests, to surveys of student perceptions. The data gathered on these tools will be compared with evidence of student outcomes, and combinations of measures will be simulated to determine which “multiple measures” might work best.

ruments themselves or the means of collecting evidence. The quality must pervade how the measures are implemented, not just what measures are implemented.

ns that classroom observation will require a substantial effort to provide adequate training for those who will evaluate, rigorous requirements to show that evaluators are applying scoring criteria consistently, and monitoring or quality-checking of scorers to make sure those judgments stay on track over time and in different classrooms.