Unfortunately, the Obama administration is offering mixed, if not contradictory, signals in this regard, doubling funding for teacher training to $235 million in the 2011 budget while at the same time endorsing mass teacher firings in the name of accountability.

"Teaching," Education Secretary Arne Duncan writes in the current issue of American Educator, "should be one of the nation's most revered professions. Teachers should be amply compensated, fairly evaluated, and supported by topnotch professional development. Yet teachers are not accorded the respect they deserve--and teaching is still not treated as a profession on par with other highly skilled professions."

If this is his real view, great--then he shouldn't side so quickly with those whose first instinct is to punish and malign teachers rather than ensure they have support to do better. Duncan acknowledges that many teachers don't get "enough time to collaborate and plan with their colleagues, discuss problem students, and learn from their peers. Professional development is generally of poor quality, and often fails to develop a teacher's skills."

He should be doing more to highlight schools, especially in urban areas, that are finding creative, cost-effective ways to tackle these problems and remain public institutions. A great example is the Brooklyn Generation public high school, which Elena Silva from Education Sector examines in a remarkable study called Teachers at Work.

"Better teaching, in the long run," Silva notes, "will come not just from attracting a strong pool of talent and giving them boosts in pay, but from changing the nature of the job." Brooklyn Generation transforms the nature and quality of teaching by redesigning the daily schedule and school calendar to ensure constant collaboration and planning so that all teachers have more "time to learn from each other and to learn from their work."

This is a radical break from how teachers are normally treated and expected to act. It jettisons the model of teaching as a low-status, unskilled occupation, which Silva convincingly compares to the job of a retail cashier: "work that is solitary, lacks growth opportunities, and is generally measured by time on task over quality of outcomes." Instead, teachers at Brooklyn Generation "experience a setting that is very different from the norm, one that combines talent and encourages collaboration... and gives teachers the chance to improve their work by making them a part of their own management and evaluation--all harbingers of professional work." Duncan should pay them a visit.