The last decade has included some powerful and harsh narratives about U.S. public education and its teachers: Public schools are failing, particularly in international comparisons; that failure is primarily caused by “bad” teachers and corrupt teachers’ unions; and teacher education, historically weak, does little to help correct the low quality of the teacher workforce.
Yet, my nearly three decades in education—18 years teaching high school English in rural South Carolina and ten years in teacher education—and as an education scholar have proven to me that these narratives are essentially false or at least distortions of what is true. I have made the case that the rush to embrace charter schools fails to start with what education problem we are trying to solve, and I now want to make a similar argument about teacher quality and
