This is an excerpt from a discussion posted at the listserv for the AAPT Committee on Teacher Preparation (subscription is available at http://aapt.org/Membership/listservs.cfm)

I would like to make a short comment to the Kyle Linehan’s remarks: “I have a hard time believing that our teachers in previous decades were somehow doing a better job” and “The teachers I have worked with the last few years are some of the most dedicated, intelligent, hard working, caring, and outstanding professionals”.

The bell curve is a good model for a distribution when we deal with big numbers, including the quality of schoolteachers. There are always excellent teachers, very good ones, good, so-so, and poor ones. But, if we try to mach the quality distribution and, say, place of living, we find that suburb teachers and inner city schoolteachers on average belong to different branches of the curve. If one school has dedicated, intelligent, hard working, caring, and outstanding teachers, another school should have mostly so-so teachers, even if all of them are very good persons and hard working individuals. We cannot really compare the today’s bell curve with the couple of decades old one, because we do not have the needed statistical information. But, I agree with Kyle Linehan that it is doubtable that our teachers in previous decades were somehow doing a better job, so the curves a probably the same.

Nowadays we want to shift the curve as a whole, maybe reshape it; at least there is a talk (by the way, similar talks were circulating in decades). There are two main reason for blaming teachers for the low level of education; 1) it is the easiest thing to do (sounds very logical: bad teachers = bad education; good teachers = good education; end vice-versa); 2) it is true that many school teachers are not as good as they should be (I know because a) I work with teachers, b) I work with students who are graduates from high schools around). The questions are: are we really going to do something now, on what scale, on what political level? I think we should expect some changes coming from the government, not because current teachers are worse than previous ones, but because the current level of education (which is roughly the same as the previous one) is not satisfying anymore (one of the reasons is that other countries becoming better at education kids – hooray to a competition!; I personally can compare my Russian and American students). In this situation teachers should become more involved in the process of making changes, they should say: “We are teaching our kids every day and we know better what we need to give them for a better education. You want us be better teacher, OK, we want you be better researchers, authors, publishers, policymakers, etc; we need from you ……” (I leave to teachers finishing this sentence). With this kind of a dialog and cooperation, the curve can be finally changed.