Teacher professionalism and educational restructuring have the same goal--to make teachers more responsive to their students. To transform teaching into an authentic profession involves six changes: reforming teacher education and licensing, restructuring schools, reforming unions, improving accountability, and bettering salaries and working…

Criteria that characterize competent teachers of the disadvantaged are concerned with the areas of academic preparation, preservice internships, personality, and continuous professional growth. (Author/IRT)

The 1980s will see more emphasis on the practical use of foreign languages and on teaching for international understanding. Language teachers should have the ability to speak the language and have had experience abroad. (Author/MLF)

Schools and districts rarely have a fair distribution of teacher talent. Poor children and black children are less likely to be taught by the strongest teachers and more likely to be taught by the weakest. Several districts have implemented programs to reduce the teacher quality gap. Hamilton County, Tennessee, launched an initiative that included…

Teachers' ratings of the effectiveness of supervisors are strongly influenced by supervisors' interpersonal skills, according to a study of 143 science supervisors and 258 teachers. (Author)

Proposals to improve teacher quality often focus on hiring teachers with the right combination of personality, values, and knowledge and skills. The author suggests that although these elements of teacher quality are important, schools also need to pay attention to the conditions of classroom life that can determine teaching quality. She…

Lists some reasons why supervisors are often among the first personnel to be cut in a budget crunch, then lists six abilities essential for the survival of supervisors in education's changing climate. (JM)

Reviews research comparing teaching performance of certified and uncertified teachers. Concludes that certified teachers perform better in the classroom than do uncertified teachers. Furthermore, teachers completing many alternative-teacher-certification programs may not perform any better than uncertified teachers. Empirical study finds that…

Setting minimum competency levels for teachers is a symptom of what is wrong with educational attitudes in the United States. Without an adequate commitment of education, and in light of the entrenched position of the educational establishment, the nation's stopgap efforts will not serve education's critical need for fundamental change. (PGD)

As President of the American Federation of Teachers and a member of the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, Shanker advocates fundamental changes in the ways educators do business. Educators should deemphasize teacher lecturing, differentiate teachers' roles and functions, and conceive of students as workers requiring different…

Unions are increasingly advocating for teaching as an occupation and for public education as an American institution. New and improved unionism is replacing teachers as industrial workers with teachers as knowledge workers empowered to devise educational solutions from the classroom up. Unions' new vision will be organized around quality,…

A study of the reassignment of a shrinking metropolitan district's unterminated high school teachers during the late 1970s and early 1980s revealed that except in music and home economics, the number of classes taught by teachers who had majored in the relevant subject area declined, sometimes dramatically. (PGD)

Reports on a five-year experimental program at the University of Chicago to train teachers for urban schools. Program was financed by the Ford Foundation. (DS)

Describes the rationale and design of the Zepeda/Saldate Spanish Language Proficiency Exam developed at the University of Arizona for use in evaluating the language proficiency of applicants for bilingual/bicultural teacher education programs. (JG)