Historical accounts of America’s teaching profession tell a stormy and convoluted story, documenting more than a century of struggle to determine who will teach what and how, under what conditions, and at what cost. As we enter the 21st century’s second decade, education decision makers still opt for patchwork teaching policy that often lowers entry standards to keep salaries and preparation costs down – and over-values today’s standardized achievement tests to judge students and the teachers who teach them.

Policymakers, practitioners, and the public have much work to do to build a 21st century teaching profession that can fully meet the needs of students who enter our public schools now and in the future. As posed in our book, Teaching 2030, we call for several big ideas that make it possible for teachers to meet 21st century demands:

1. Digital tools will allow students to learn 24/7 and authentically demonstrate what they know, while teachers will serve as brokers of learning and experts in defining and measuring student and school success for the public.
    
2. A leadership force of 600,000 “teacherpreneurs” — classroom experts who continue to teach students regularly while also serving as teacher educators, policy researchers, assessment experts, community organizers, and trustees of their profession – will blur the lines of distinction between those who teach in schools and those who lead them.
    
3. Teaching will be a well-compensated professional career with differentiated pathways into the classroom, but with guarantees that every child has a well-prepared team of educators, led by the most expert teachers whose expertise is spread in and out of cyberspace.

The Center for Teaching Quality, now 11 years in the making, engages in a variety of major initiatives and projects to advance this powerful and provocative vision of teaching – and the results-oriented profession that students deserve.