Superstar author Malcolm Gladwell's current New Yorker piece, titled "Most Likely to Succeed," conveys that the difficulties scouts have in identifying college quarterbacks who will be successful as pros has something to do with the challenge of hiring good teachers. He defines what he calls "the quarterback problem" this way: "there are certain jobs where almost nothing you can learn about candidates before they start predicts how they will do once they're hired." Just as coveted college stars like Ryan Leaf and Joey Harrington flop in the pros, some graduates of leading schools of education end up boring their students to death.

The solution for the teaching profession, Gladwell argues, is to follow the path of the financial advice industry. (He doesn't broach the question of the quality of advice clients in said industry have received in recent years). The model is a four-month training camp in which apprentice advisers are challenged to retain clients and are weeded out based on how well they do by that measure. Gladwell cites sources who say you'd probably have to try out four candidates to find one good teacher.

But there are only a few dozen professional quarterbacking jobs in contrast to some 7 million public school teachers, with significant shortages in many cities and subjects. Whatever your position on the appropriate credentialing of teachers, most urban school administrators don't have the luxury of selecting 25 percent of applicants after some sort of closely monitored trial period.

Much more germane to the teaching profession is developing a far more effective, teamwork approach so that instead of relying entirely on the talents of individual teachers to instruct their students in isolation, they can learn from each other on an ongoing basis how to better connect with their students. Here's how Harvard professor Richard Elmore puts it:

Schools are not organized to support problem-solving based on cooperation or collaboration. The ethic of atomized teaching--teachers practicing as individuals with individual styles--is very strong in schools. We subscribe to an extremely peculiar view of professionalism: that professionalism equals autonomy in practice. So when I come to your classroom and say, "Why are you teaching in this way?" it is viewed as a violation of your autonomy and professionalism.

Consider what would happen if you were on an airplane and the pilot came on the intercom as you were starting your descent and said, "I've always wanted to try this without the flaps." Or if your surgeon said to you in your pre-surgical conference, "You know, I'd really like to do this the way I originally learned how to do it in 1978." Would you be a willing participant in this?

People get sued for doing that in the "real" professions, where the absence of a strong technical core of knowledge and discourse about what effective practice is carries a very high price. Instructionally, we know what works in many content areas. But the distribution of knowledge is uneven, and we resist the idea of calibrating our practice to external benchmarks.

School systems are also characterized by weak internal accountability. When I use that term, I mean the intersection between the individual's sense of responsibility, the organization's expectations about what constitutes quality instruction and good student performance, and the systemic means or processes by which we actually account for what we do. How frequently do we observe teachers? How do we analyze performance data? How do we think about teachers' performance? The schools in which these things are aligned have very powerful approaches to the improvement of instruction. When they are not aligned--and in most cases they are not--schools have extreme difficulty responding to external pressure for improved performance.

Meanwhile, the usual remediation strategies we employ when kids fail to meet the statewide testing requirements are to give them the same unbelievably bad instruction they got in the first place, only in much larger quantities with much greater intensity. This is what we call the louder and slower approach.

If the only benchmarks you have come from your own connoisseurship--your particular opinions and ideas about what good practice is--then you're in trouble. Real improvement comes when you visit a classroom where somebody is doing the same thing you are--only much better. That's when the real conversation, the tough conversation about improvement takes place.

Some teachers have more natural ability than others, as with any profession. But thinking of the challenge of improving education as a team sport in which teachers and administrators have a shared responsibility to their school's students is much more likely to be effective. Quarterbacks, linemen, and even financial planners need ongoing coaching to get better -- so do teachers.