When is teaching more a public service than a profession?

Time asks an important question this week.  How do we build up respect for the vocation of teaching, when we also consider it a public service that a smart graduate can pick up in only a few weeks of Summer training?

Yet even as momentum builds for nontraditional training programs to get more talented people into classrooms — the Obama Administration requested $405 million in the 2011 budget to fund alternative pathways to teaching — a basic question may have been overlooked: What does it mean when we decide that teaching is more a public service than a profession? “Think about medical-residency programs,” says Joanna Jacobson, founder of Strategic Grant Partners, a pro bono consulting firm that funds and counsels education-reform efforts around the nation. “The feds support doctors who choose residencies in high-needs urban and rural areas. But they are not doing an all-call to anyone who wants to dabble around and be a doctor.” She also says, pointedly, “Not everyone can be a good teacher.”

The Department of Education estimates that by 2014, the nation will need up to 1 million new teachers. But if a city has too many broken streetlights, should it ask for paid volunteers to fix them? Or should it hire more professional electricians?

via How to Recruit Better Public-School Teachers -What Makes a School Great- Printout – TIME.