Why don?t more of our smartest, most accomplished college graduates want to become teachers?
People trying to improve education in this country have been talking a lot lately about boosting ?teacher effectiveness.? But nearly all such efforts focus on the teachers who are already in the classroom, instead of seeking to change the caliber of the people who enter teaching.
Three of the top-performing school systems in the world — those in Finland, Singapore and South Korea — take a different approach, recruiting 100 percent of their teachers from the top third of their high school and college students. Simply put, they don?t take middling students and make them teachers. They tap their best people for the job.