Recently, it seems the only conversation about education that anyone seems to be having is whether charter schools are better or worse than "regular" public schools. For me, this discussion has grown very old, and it is entirely missing the point. In order to improve education for all schools, we need to be talking about the classroom: what is happening between our teachers and our students as they engage around content and skills?

This is a much more difficult conversation than one about charter schools vs. district schools, and is not nearly as newsworthy. But it is one that many of the best schools in the city have every day even as the “white noise” of the news about budget cuts, test scores, and union negotiations attempt to distract us from our mission of educating every child.This Thursday is a Chancellor’s Day, one of two days each year when teachers get to work together for a whole day.

If you want to find out about what your school values, ask what your teachers will be doing on Thursday.<!--more-->At Arts & Letters, we will be conducting “Teacher Roundtables.” Each semester we ask our students to discuss their work with community members and teachers, and to answer questions about what they are learning in every subject. We realized that we cannot ask our students to do something that we are not doing ourselves, so we decided to do Roundtables for educators too. To prepare, each teacher has crafted a teaching question such as:

  • How can I create projects that allow all kinds of learners to engage and meet or exceed my expectations?

  • How can I ensure that students’ science notebooks demonstrate their thinking?

  • How do I inspire the uninspired artist?

The activity requires genuine curiosity about teaching and learning; all teachers bring a question and examples of their work and student work to look at. Teachers take turns critiquing one another’s work, using the question as their guide. Sometimes it will be celebratory, and sometimes, it will bring to light areas in which a teacher is struggling. It makes teachers visible, accountable to colleagues, and so much less isolated.

If we are serious about all schools becoming great, we must expect teachers to be the ultimate professionals, which means we need to make the conversation engaging, intellectual, and practical. And, we need to help the public understand that as long as the conversation remains mostly about how schools are structured and paid for, we are, at best, avoiding the hard work, and at worst, rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.