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.