Who's Teaching Your Children?

Why the Teacher Crisis Is Worse Than You Think and What Can Be Done About It

Vivian Troen, Katherine C. Boles

• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Year: 2008
• eBook ISBN: 9780300134629
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Educational Policy

The shortage of qualified teachers in our nation's classrooms is critical, and it is getting worse. This thought-provoking book reveals the reasons for the crisis and offers concrete, affordable solutions.

“A practical vision of how our children can get the high-quality teaching they deserve—a vision worth pondering and even implementing.”—Ted Fiske, former Education Editor of the New York Times and co-author of When Schools Compete: A Cautionary Tale

“This book should be read not just by teachers and teacher educators but also by parents, citizens, and policy makers—by all those who need to speak out for children.”—Deborah Meier, Educational Leadership

“Why do so few people go into teaching, or once they have begun a career in public school teaching, abandon it? Kitty Boles and Vivian Troen, teachers both, investigate that question and then propose considerable and thoughtful changes that would bring great benefit to our beloved profession.”—Theodore Sizer and Nancy Faust Sizer, authors of The Students Are Watching: Schools and the Moral Contract

Vivian Troen and Katherine C. Boles co-founded the Learning/Teaching Collaborative, one of the country's first professional development schools, and Trilemma Solutions, an educational consultancy. Boles is currently a lecturer on education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and Troen is implementing professional development school initiatives at Brandeis University.

Table of contents

• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Prologue
• Introduction
• 1. Your Children Aren’t Getting the Teachers They Deserve
• 2. How Teaching Got to Be This Way
• 3. Teacher Training: How Bad Is It?
• 4. Mamas, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Teachers
• 5. Band-Aids and Boondoggles: The Myths and Realities of ‘‘Education Reform’’
• 6. The Millennium School: A Total Approach to Solving the Fundamental Problems of Elementary Education
• Epilogue: E Pluribus Unum
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index