Negative public perception of schools nationally impacts the teaching profession in direct and indirect ways. This perception has depressed the number of students in teacher preparation programs at universities. Indirectly, public perception affects teacher working conditions, compensation, and morale. Education advocates and researchers talk…

True reimaging of education requires us to first look back to understand why schools are the way they are, says Deborah Ball. She focuses specifically on the teaching profession and how it has become grounded in whiteness, leaving out the wisdom available among people of color. From this, she draws three lessons to take into the future: (1) The…

New Jersey's Vineland Public Schools formed a partnership with Rowan University's College of Education, in Glassboro, New Jersey, to create a dual-enrollment program in teacher education specifically designed for students in the bilingual program. This program provides Spanish-speaking students with coursework in their native language that leads…

Americans' ratings of their community's public schools reached a new high dating back 48 years in this year's PDK Poll of Public Attitudes Toward the Public Schools, while fewer than ever express interest in having their child work as a public school teacher. Results of the 54th annual PDK poll tell a tale of conflicted views of public schools --…

Previous efforts to strengthen the teaching profession have aimed to copy the ways in which law, medicine, and architecture achieved that status -- for example, by carving out decision-making autonomy, controlling who enters the field, and building a specialized knowledge base. What has been missing, however, have been efforts to clarify precisely…

Teaching has always been a demanding profession, and the demands have only escalated during the COVID-19 pandemic. David T. Marshall, Tim Pressley, Natalie M. Neugebauer, & David M. Shannon review research from before and during the pandemic to learn what makes teachers likely to leave the profession and share results from their May 2022…

Understanding the early teacher pipeline, how many and what types of individuals are pursuing a teaching credential, is critically important. Unfortunately, as Dan Goldhaber and Kris Holden explain, the two national data collections that can be used to explore these areas provide incomplete and sometimes contrasting pictures about the number of…

Preservice teachers base their expectations of teaching on the cultural images that surround them. Unfortunately, these images tell an incomplete story, and preservice teachers' expectations of teaching often reflect a narrow understanding of a fantastically complex endeavor. Jeremy Delamarter explains that, to help their candidates thrive,…

In this interview, Sonia Nieto shares what she has learned from her long career in teaching, teacher education, and research about what motivates teachers to continue coming to the classroom each day. She shares the story of her early years as a teacher and how professional relationships helped her to thrive. And she describes the varied ways that…

Accreditation agencies and organizations calling for higher academic standards in the teaching profession have called for increasing minimum grade point averages and scores on standardized tests. However, it's not clear that these requirements actually improve teaching. Lisa Borden-King, Warren Gamas, Kathy Hintz, and Chelsie Hultz researched…

Amid already critical teacher shortages, the COVID-19 pandemic has prompted many teachers to leave the profession, but we know little about how it may affect teacher recruitment. Kayla Bill, Amanda Bowsher, Betty Malen, Jennifer King Rice, and Jason Saltmarsh conducted a survey and focus groups to explore how COVID-19 has influenced…

There is a long-held but inaccurate belief that new teachers' expertise and talent is mostly innate and that it peaks and plateaus within their first few years of teaching. William Slotnik and Bryan Goodwin explain that school systems need to abandon this conventional wisdom and instead build true talent development systems that support the…

Educators Rising, which is part of the PDK International Family of Associations, developed a set of seven standards to define what high school students exploring teaching need to know and be able to do to take their first steps on the path to accomplished teaching. The standards represent a new, shared vision from the field; the teaching…

The 2019 PDK Poll of the Public's Attitude Toward the Public Schools finds that half of public school teachers have considered leaving the profession in the past year, and majorities say that, given the opportunity, they'd vote to strike, an action that large majorities of parents and the public say they'd support. In other results, Americans say…

Two decades ago, at a time when much of the country faced looming teacher shortages, a number of states invested in comprehensive strategies for strengthening the teaching profession. For example, and drawing upon recommendations from the National Commission on Teaching & America's Future, both California and North Carolina built statewide…