handbook for the new technique

The handbook for the new technique looks shrilly alike to the Teach for America model, which is not a coincidence. The man who designed it, Jason Kamras, is a past Teach for America trainer who taught in a low-income D.C. school for eight existence before being special by D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee to help fix the schools. Rhee is herself a Teach for America alumna, who went on to run the New Teacher Project.

Washington, D.C., is also applying for Race to the Top money from the Obama administration, along with many states. To reduce, states must first eliminate any lawful barriers to linking student trial scores to teachers—something California and Wisconsin are already doing. To win money, states must also initiate distinguishing between actual and ineffective teachers—and consider that information when deciding whether to funding tenure, give raises, or fire a tutor or principal (a linkage that the National Education Association, the country's biggest teachers union, has criticized as "inappropriate" national interference in citizen prerogatives). And each year, states must broadcast which of their education and other prep programs produced the most real (and ineffective) teachers and principals. If nation and regional school officials, along with teachers unions, phase up to the challenge, Race to the Top could begin to rationalize America's schools.

By the time the Obama administration begins handing out awards this mechanism, Mr. Taylor will be final up another year at Kimball Elementary. On the mornings his students take their standardized tests, he will chef a hot breakfast of sausage, eggs, and toast for them, as he always does. But this tradition may be coming to an end. He's belief about quitting in the next few living.

Mr. Taylor desires to become a principal. In just three years as a teacher, he feels that he has already run up against the confines of his classroom. He needs to take what he has learned to scale. That way, he says, "it won't just stay with me, bundled in Room 204." He is, like many great teachers, well alert that he is not one in a million—or at least, that he should not be.