“Teacher Quality 2.0: Toward a New Era in Education Reform”

What if nearly every student could have access to an outstanding teacher…without having to magically create thousands of new excellent teachers? If this seems impossible, then you are likely thinking about “1.0” teaching in an increasingly “2.0” world of schooling. An edited volume released today unpacks this distinction and suggests new directions for evaluating and improving teacher quality.

As Rick Hess and Mike McShane, my colleagues at AEI and editors of the new “Teacher Quality 2.0: Toward a New Era in Education Reform” (out today from Harvard Education Press) write, we can broadly divide the history of K-12 teaching into three eras. “0.0” teaching began in the late 1800s, when basic but rigid reforms (such as measures for teacher education and certification) emerged to standardize the teaching profession. 0.0 teaching was the norm until the 1990s, when standardized test data became available and computers allowed us to process increasingly large data sets. This allowed us to evaluate student performance and teacher quality in more systematic ways. Hess and McShane refer to this as “1.0” teaching. 1.0 teaching is the status quo today, and many proposed reforms—tying teacher pay to student performance, for example—assume a 1.0 vision of schooling.

The thesis of “Teacher Quality 2.0” is that it’s time for “2.0” teaching: a period in which we do more than just generate increasing amounts of data; we reconceptualize existing education systems (schools, districts, states) and definitions (What is a teacher? What is a classroom?) to foster innovation. The goal is not to upgrade all of our education systems to 2.0 systems; it’s to create very flexible systems that are compatible with teaching 2.0, 3.0, and beyond. In short, a 2.0 mindset requires improving on all of the 1.0 reforms and creating the flexibility and incentives for subsequent innovation.

Let’s get more concrete about what the book recommends. How do we solve the quandary of increasing access to good teaching without substantially increasing the percentage of good teachers? The beauty of 2.0 thinking is that there are many ways to do this, not just one—and this book provides examples of schools succeeding using multiple strategies. Schools can redesign their staffing practices in a number of ways to promote access, as long as they abandon the restrictive 1.0 model of “one teacher, one classroom.”

For example, good teachers could be offered additional pay to teach larger class sizes. They could be elevated into leadership positions where they mentor other teachers, which would allow them to share best practices and develop others into better teachers. Teachers could specialize more, so that an outstanding second-grade math teacher could teach everyone math rather than splitting her time between math, science, reading, and social studies. And if a school didn’t have an excellent math teacher, it could opt for remote teaching from an excellent teacher.

Other chapters in “Teacher Quality 2.0” apply this logic of student-centered flexibility to issues like HR departments, teacher preparation programs, and education research, and present case studies of the 2.0 mindset in action (don’t miss Chapter 6 on cyber charter schools). McShane and Taryn Hochleitner argue in the conclusion that these sorts of reforms are sorely needed. It’s not that they’re needed because 2.0 schools will necessarily outperform 1.0 schools—the nature of innovation and experimentation is that sometimes things fail. Rather, it’s that 1.0 reforms will not be sufficient to achieve all of our goals for education, and that we owe it to ourselves to broaden our mindsets and try out the possibilities of 2.0 reform.

For more on “Teacher Quality 2.0,” visit the book page here and join us tomorrow, August 27^th, at 3:00 PM Eastern time for a Google Hangout to discuss the book’s findings.

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