In a piece in this week's Chronicle of Higher Education, Vartan Gregorian, president of the Carnegie Corporation and former president of Brown University argues that we should stop blaming teachers for their professional shortcomings and start pointing fingers at the universities and colleges that train them.
Gregorian notes that, while our nation's ed schools train more than enough teachers each year, more than 30 percent of all new teachers-and up to 50 percent of those in large, urban districts-leave teaching within 5 years. One of the main reasons they give for leaving is that they were inadequately prepared for the job.
Why are ed schools doing such a lousy job of preparing teachers? Gregorian offers a few possible explanations. Ed schools lower their standards and pile on course requirements in order to keep enrollments up so that they can make their financial ends meet. Within ed schools, teacher training is considered low-prestige, entry-level work meant for junior faculty, part-time professors and teaching assistants, many of whom themselves have little or no classroom teaching experience.
Regardless of the cause of today's weak teacher preparation, there is a growing consensus that boosting teacher quality is a key to better schools, and Gregorian expresses hope that the present crisis will motivate us to make real changes. Among the changes he suggests: 1) universities should close substandard ed schools or give them the support they need to become first-rate, 2) colleges should require teachers to major in academic subjects, not education, and 3) higher ed leaders should demand more rigorous licensing systems while ending their opposition to sound alternative certification programs. In conclusion, Gregorian urges colleges to make teacher education their central preoccupation.
The main thing missing from his proposals is any real lever for change. Higher ed leaders have been willing to overlook ineffective schools of education on their campuses for so long that it is hard to hold great hope for a revolution in teacher education mounted from within the university. Instead, we should put market forces to work. If we gave school principals the ability to hire the most qualified people they can find, regardless of whether the prospective teachers have been trained in ed schools, then ed schools would have to offer valuable services or they'd lose their customers. The surest way to improve ed schools is to strip them of their near-monopoly on training and licensing teachers and force their graduates to compete with other college graduates, licensed or not, for teaching positions in U.S. public schools.
"Teacher Education Must Become Colleges' Central Preoccupation," by Vartan Gregorian, Chronicle of Higher Education, August 17, 2001 http://chronicle.com/weekly/v47/i49/49b00701.htm (available to subscribers only)