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Newsweek excels at self-parody. It has long produced lop-sided and simplistic reporting on school reform. But this week's lead story takes the cake: "The Problem with Education is Teachers."

I had a hissy fit when I first read that inflammatory and irresponsible headline. And the lede pushed me over the edge: "Getting rid of bad teachers is the solution to turning around failing urban schools." Any journalist who writes about "the solution" to anything should get a pay cut. Another subtitle for the article just added insult to injury: "In no other profession are workers so insulated from accountability." Well, what about journalism?

It's too bad Newsweek ran such a poor piece. They could have learned a thing or two about schools and journalism if they had read Elizabeth Green's wonderful piece in last weeks' New York Times Magazine. Newsweek's authors interviewed only the usual reform suspects, ignored viewpoints that clashed with their angle, ignored the role of factors like staff development and curriculum, and went for the sensational headline. Green's story is a world apart from all that.

For one, Green asks logical questions about what has become received wisdom in some school reform circles. Can TFA really supply the needs of all our troubled urban and rural schools? If we fired "bad teachers" at the bottom and hired "great" ones at the top, would we really solve our education problems? What about the mass of teachers, millions of them, in the middle? And she talks with people on the ground--not just think tank dwellers--who believe you have to build talent and not just buy it.

Green lets Harvard economist Tom Kane be the voice of reason:

There is simply too much potential in improving the vast number of teachers who neither drag their students down nor pull them ahead.

By figuring out what makes the great teachers great, and passing that on to the mass of researchers in the middle, [Kane] said, "we could ensure that the average classroom tomorrow was seeing the types of gains that the top quarter of our classrooms see today."

A rather obvious point, as it turns out, but one that never occurs to the hang 'em high crowd over at Newsweek.

Green's article is refreshing, because it doesn't succumb to the perverse assumptions that motivate so much reporting on schools these days. Among them:

When It Comes to Teachers, It's OK to Indulge in a Bit of Profiling. Journalists seem to have reached a silent accord about what a great teacher looks like. Are you over 35? No Ivy League degree? Sorry, you fit the wrong profile.

So should we be surprised that some people get worked up over Teach for America? If some veteran teachers viscerally distrust fresh TFA recruits, don't blame the recruits themselves. Chalk it up to the work of reporters, PR flacks, and pundits who again and again implicitly damn millions of veteran teachers as they celebrate the great young hope for urban schools. Or blame it on their ham-handed insensitivity to the subtle, and at times not so subtle, messages they're sending about age, class and privilege.

According to Newsweek, teaching in urban schools is only "for a chosen few," and TFA recruits are the chosen ones. Green, by contrast takes a more level-headed view: "So far,... programs that recruit a more-elite teaching corps, like Teach for America, have thin records of reliably improving student learning." TFA can surely be an important part of the solution, but young teachers and veteran teachers alike need ongoing development an support, a point not lost on TFA itself.

Every Child Can Learn, but Teachers Are Ineducable. In the education business, we're meant to believe in the limitless potential of all people. Every child can learn. Every adult can and must learn throughout her life, because the world is changing so fast. That's the new education gospel, and for good reason.

So it's odd that teachers should be exempt from this logic. The think tanks are trying to figure out how to hire the good ones and fire the bad ones, but staff development is just ever so déclassé. Either you've got it or you don't.

Green, by contrast, champions the premise that great teaching can be taught, even to those who don't evince greatness right off the bat. Green concedes that we're still figuring out how to do this, but she certainly doesn't think we should give up the fight.

The Fate of Our Schools Hangs on the Outcome of an Epic Battle Between Alternative and Traditional Programs. And in case you're wondering.... Alternative: good. Traditional: bad.

Green doesn't fall for that version of things. Instead, she profiles charter school leader and an ed school professor who "are compatriots in the same vanguard, arguing that great teachers are not born but made." Doug Lemov of Uncommon Schools believes he can define and teach the classroom management techniques that great teachers use. Deborah Loewenberg Ball of Michigan State believes teachers can learn how to teach content more effectively. Each adds something to our understanding of how we can best prepare teachers for the rigors of their jobs. Each can learn from the other.

And that's a major strength of Green's article. She doesn't depend on pitched battles between "reformers" and "the establishment." Wisdom, it seems, can emerge from anywhere: a charter school, an ed school, or a traditional public school. And though some are born great, most can achieve greatness if we just make the right investment in them.

Update 3/9/2010: The Core Knowledge Blog, which is back on line and looking quite snazzy, does a better job than I do of exposing the dangers of Newsweek's approach.