Arthur Levine, the former president of Teachers College at Columbia University just issued a report about the state of teacher education programs in our country. He found that:
More than half of teacher education graduates come from programs that have low admission and graduation standards, said Levine, president of the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation. The faculty members who teach the future teachers are sometimes years removed from being in a classroom other than their own, and graduates often emerge ill-prepared to start their teaching careers, according to the report.
In “Educating School Teachers,” the second in a four-part series of policy papers on the education of future educators, Levine describes teacher education as a “chaotic” field largely lacking in uniform standards and accountability.
He referred to education schools as “cash cows” and called for education schools to adopt a five-year model in which students major as an undergraduate in a discipline other than education and finish with a yearlong master’s degree in education.
Apt. 11d 
There’s been some research on this subject, and it don’t look pretty. Part of the problem is the lack of a single national curriculum (what NCLB should have been), a single set of standards, and a research-based approach to improving the curriculum. Even if the curriculum isn’t mandated, having a single federal standard would provide a set of general accepted practices.
I don’t think you can blame the teachers or the ed schools, primarily. There are 50 different curricula, implemented more or less rigidly in thousands of districts. There are dozens of new theories and teaching models every few years, and there is little in the way of follow up research to improve on them or tell if they need discarding. Follow Through, in the 1960s and 1970s, cost a billion dollars. The results were promising but controversial. No further money was invested, none of the competing models were further tested. Only in America can you pour a billion dollars in a hole and then keep doing what you were doing before.
Is a teacher with a Masters in biology that much more qualified as a teacher? I think it matters a great deal to have expertise in secondary school, but in primary school the money should be spent increasing wages to make the talent pool more competitive.
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Arthur Levine , the former president of Teachers College at Columbia University just issued a report about the state of teacher education programs in our country. […]
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I’m a ’98 graduate of TC. I’ve never heard this opinion from Levine, whose institution charges $975 per credit. (I believe it was $610 9 years ago when I graduated.) Having talked to various colleagues throughout my career, I would agree about the “chaotic” bit. One common thread, though- most classes were about lesson planning, adolescent psych, special needs, and current trends, but not much offered on the basics to achieving anything: classroom management. Luckily in my district we have a local guru come in to help first year teachers with exactly that.
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