If one is to follow American education, one needs to follow global education, too - we really need to be global scholars. And it should surprise no one that many of the issues we face in American education are being tackled in the United Kingdom, too.

Dave Saba of the American Board for Certification of Teacher Excellence wrote an excellent post yesterday about how we might go about increasing the effectiveness of our teachers - I critiqued his brief essay and offered two suggestions of my own. Saba addressed some of the basic issues we've had on teacher quality; last week BBC News reported on similar troubles in Britain:

"Christine Gilbert, head of the Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted), told the Sunday Telegraph pupils were being let down by inadequate teachers.

She said "parents should not have to put up with it".

However, the Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) said: "The vast majority of our teachers are doing an excellent job."

Gilbert said that we need better teachers and that we need more flexibility to replace the ineffective instructors:

"In the newspaper interview, Ms Gilbert called for schools to be able to fire underperforming staff more easily and criticised a "revolving door syndrome" which enabled poor to teachers move from school to school."

Cynics and realists in public education call that "passing the trash," and oftentimes poor staff move on to schools who need high-quality instruction the most.

"They [school officials] say they start the procedure and they might be 18 months down the line and the teacher will move... we need to be thinking of ways of preventing that."

In addition to removing underperforming staff, Gilbert would like to see experienced teachers mentoring newer teachers:

"The DCSF said the system to help struggling teachers would include "continuous professional development, such as mentoring and help from the head, to improve on their classroom management and teaching skills".

Not a bad idea. These two countries and their public education systems have a lot in common; consequently, they've got solutions to share.