What is the role of teachers unions in successful countries?
Other countries put a lot of energy into recruiting the best and the brightest into teaching, training them very intensely, making sure they have professional training. They undoubtedly have ways to get rid of incompetent teachers, but they put a lot of effort on how to be sure that the teachers are competent in the first place. In this country, I’ve been advocating for a long time, how do we get teachers that are highly competent in the first place. If we’re thinking about what we need to do to be competitive with other nations, we need to be thinking about building a supply of great teachers and continually improving their skills, rather than only focusing on the bad teachers when we haven’t helped them learn how to be good. So which countries are going to be the models for the Obama administration? Certainly we have a different context both politically and in how our education system is organized, but I will say that if you look at some of the highest-achieving states in the United
