The nation’s leading teacher educators made a startling admission last year in their tome, Studying Teacher Education, by conceding there’s little evidence that what happens in ed schools helps in the K-12 classroom. But more astonishing, writes Kate Walsh in Fordham’s Teacher Education: Coming Up Empty, is that the professoriate ignores the most pressing education problem of our time, the achievement gap. “Had the panel asserted that teacher education should be the front line in the nation’s war against the achievement gap,” Walsh writes, “it could have made a sound case for justifying the existence of the profession. Instead, it passes on this mandate to help right educational inequities, and thus consigns itself to irrelevance.
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