The other issues you brought up as having vital importance are “autonomy, mastery, and purpose”. In public education the educator no longer has autonomy; and unless there is a huge cultural shift in policies, we cannot promise autonomy to candidates. We can sill offer mastery and purpose as carrots. Big carrots.

The issue is – so can many other professions. We all hope to attract the best and brightest to our profession; will we be able to accomplish this with only 50% of what other careers have to offer? The way this has been done in the past, and will be done in the future, is through the power of emotion: “You CAN make a difference.” While remaining poor & following a narrow set of standards.

Educators have never been well paid, so that is not a true issue. We may be able, or I should say we will be able in the future to return to antonymous leadership in the classroom. This will be necessary to allow excellence to flourish. With that in mind, our goal in the next few years should be to focus on teacher autonomy if Pink’s theories are correct.