And, even the New York Times weighs in on the importance of teacher quality.
Mike Johnston’s mother was a public-school teacher. So were her mother and father. And his godfather taught in both public and private schools.
So when he expresses the concern that we’re not getting the best teachers into classrooms or weeding out the worst performers, it’s not as someone who sees the profession from a cold, cynical distance.
What I hear in his voice when he talks about teaching is reverence, along with something else that public education could use more of: optimism.
He rightly calls teachers “the single most transformative force in education.”
But the current system doesn’t enable as many of them as possible to rise to that role, he says. And a prime culprit is tenure, at least as it still exists in most states.