In the raging controversy over the purpose of public education and how to fix the nation’s underperforming schools, the voices of America’s best teachers are seldom heard. Now for the first time, in a provocative book about the future of teaching and learning, 12 of America’s most accomplished classroom educators join a leading advocate for a 21st-century teaching profession to bring expert pedagogical know-how and fresh and provocative policy ideas to the national school reform debate. Together they identify four emergent realities that will shape the learning experience of children born in the New Millennium — and propose six levers of change that can ignite a bright future for our nation’s students by ensuring they all have access to excellent teaching. To create the public schools all students deserve, today and tomorrow, the authors call on policymakers and the public to work with teachers in: Creating a dynamic and flexible learning environment for students and teachers, and powerful new ways to define and measure school success; Transforming public education through digital technologies while reinventing brick-and-mortar school buildings into 24/7 hubs of community support for students and families; Re-imagining teaching as a well-compensated career with many pathways, assuring that every child has qualified and effective teachers and that teaching expertise is constantly spread, in and out cyberspace; Establishing a new leadership force of 600,000 “teacherpreneurs” — classroom experts who continue to teach students regularly while also serving as teacher educators, policy researchers, community organizers, and trustees of their profession. Teaching 2030 provides a refreshing, grounded, and lively examination of what we need to know and do in order to ensure that every public school student in America has access to qualified, caring, and effective teachers.
