John Adams’ Promise (ESSAY 2)

You can’t fix a problem if you don’t define it properly. A central issue for improving schools in the U.S. is this: there is a common core of professional knowledge about teaching and learning that gets results for students. Large segments of it are missing in action from each of the ten processes that form the supply chain of our teacher workforce. No one is accountable for seeing professional knowledge even shows up in these processes, much less in an integrated way. This is eminently fixable, but only if we redefine the problem and radically refocus our resources.