Apparently hope is in the wind, according to experts appearing before the annual seminar of the Education Writers Association. Teaching is transforming, and so are the unions.

"We used to say that teaching consisted of delivering information, giving a test, and giving a grade," Linda Darling Hammond told the education reporters. "Now, we are asking them to do much more. Direct instruction is useful for achieving good scores on low-level basic skills tests, but "indirect instruction that emphasizes higher order learning is harder to do and often badly done. Teachers rarely have had the preparation to do it well."

However, teacher preparation, licensing, and professional development are being brought into alignment with standards-based reforms, Darling Hammond said. The recent report of the National Commission on Teaching & America's Future, "What Matters Most," has spurred at least 12 states to adopt its comprehensive reforms based on standards. A professor at Teachers College/Columbia University and executive director of the Commission, she praised five-year preparation programs, calling traditional pre-service programs mostly "cash cows for campuses." The National Board for Professional Teaching Standards also is having a critical impact on standards throughout a teacher's career, she said.

To complete the transformation, teacher unions need to advocate for standards and organize around schools, not districts, Julia Koppich, co-author of a new report on teacher unions, told the reporters. She and Charles Kerchner in "United Mind Workers: Unions and Teaching in the Knowledge Society" also recommend that teacher unions adopt a craft rather than industrial model. This means unions would support electronic "hiring halls" that allow teachers to switch jobs more easily, portable pensions and benefits, and career ladders that begin as apprenticeships and advance to lead/master teacher positions.

Some of their ideas already are underway, responded Robert Chase, president of the National Education Association. In speeches and statements since he took over the largest of the two major unions last summer, Chase has promoted "a new vision of unionism" that focuses on quality student learning. "Collective bargaining can be the mother of reinvention," he assured the reporters. As an example, he said the NEA executive board had just approved a resolution encouraging local units to adopt peer assistance and peer review plans, a form of teacher accountability used in Rochester, Columbus (Ohio) and other districts.

Not reassured by his statements was Chester Finn, Jr., of the Thomas Fordham Foundation, a frequent critic of teacher unions, especially because of their lukewarm if not negative attitudes toward charter schools. He said that teacher unions still represent "the big, classic industrial model that serves the interests of members and not customers and are impervious to change. The unions "say one thing in Washington and then do something else around the country," Finn charged.

Chase said NEA units have started their own charter schools and that the union wants standards for charters because "if they do not pay attention to good data and insight, they will become the fad that has to be corrected in five years."