McKinsey just released its much-awaited report, Closing the talent gap: Attracting and retaining top third graduates to a career in teaching. To those of us in the education world the findings aren't a total surprise? students at the top of their graduating class tend not to go into the teaching profession (only 23 percent of teachers comes from the top third), and this is bad news in all sorts of obvious ways.
In usual McKinsey-style, the report approaches education's talent problem from a business perspective: the achievement gap between the US and its top-performing world peers translates into the ?economic equivalent of a permanent national recession.? For those of us in Ohio this is an especially compelling reason to reform the teaching profession.
McKinsey looks at school systems and the teaching profession in 50 other countries, lifting up places like Singapore, Finland, and South Korea where the teaching profession recruits the very best and brightest. Much of the report will depress you:
The US does not take a strategic or systematic approach to nurturing teaching talent.
And
The US ? recruits most teachers from the bottom two-thirds of college classes, and, for many schools in poor neighborhoods, from the bottom third.
But if the moral imperative to close achievement gaps is not compelling enough, then flipping through graph after graph showing the US at the bottom of the pile should disturb us into action.
McKinsey comes up with solid suggestions to improve not just the effectiveness of teachers in the classroom (and retention rates) but to ?alter the value proposition of teaching to draw young people with strong academic backgrounds to the career.? Some of them you've heard before: make admissions to teacher prep programs more rigorous, increase teacher salaries and the overall prestige of the profession, etc. Other ideas are sure to create waves, like considering reallocation away from less effective K-12 programs to pay for reforms or (gasp) adjustment student-teacher ratios (a move that a Fordham analysis shows could save millions of dollars). If you care about closing achievement gaps and improving K-12 education, or about the health of our economy, this report is worth consuming in its entirety.
Food for thought: it's worth noting that while improving the prestige of the profession may be an important piece of the puzzle, there are other reforms that could draw bright young people into the classroom. We found in our 2009 Losing Ohio's Future report, for example, that 37 percent of Ohio's top college students said they'd consider teaching, but valued things like avoiding the traditional certification process and teaching in a nontraditional setting.
- Jamie Davies O'Leary
