The Answer Sheet: teacher development

Fourteen teachers from urban schools around the country worked for a year to study how to improve troubled schools. Here are the results.

he founding director of a center that fosters best teaching practices saw "Waiting for Superman" and writes: "Conventional thinking tells us the best way to improve teacher effectiveness is to remove the ineffective teachers and replace them with effective ones. No doubt, this strategy is needed. But if we’re going for a fundamental shift in what we expect from schools, then a wholesale cast change won’t be the fix we imagine. We’ll risk ending up with a new batch of well-intentioned, but improperly prepared players in a flawed system."