Rethinking Teacher Training
Posted by Josh McGee | Education, Politics | November 03, 2009
Education Secretary Arne Duncan is making a push to revamp teacher training, or at least that’s what his recent speech at Columbia University implies. He used some fairly strong language in the speech, saying that our nations ed schools are doing “a mediocre job of preparing teachers for the realities of the 21st-century classroom.”
It is about time the department of ed publicly acknowledge the problems with our current teacher training system. The way we train teachers has remained largely the same for the last half century while labor market conditions have shifted dramatically. For more reading check out these op-ed articles discussing Secretary Duncan’s speech:
Also, I dug up an old article by Malcolm Gladwell that appeared in The New Yorker last December. Malcolm, in his unique style, details the difficulty in predicting who will be a good teacher, the Payton Manning of teaching, and who will perform more like Ryan Leaf. He makes a pretty convincing argument for retooling both teacher training and tenure.
There isn’t much in Duncan’s remarks that reformers haven’t been talking about for years, but it is nice that he is saying these things publicly.
I found the meatiest part of Duncan’s speech to be the following:
“The draft Race to the Top criteria would also reward states that publicly report and link student achievement data to the programs where teachers and principals were credentialed.”
One wonders why this information isn’t already publicly available. These schools must be held accountable, and perhaps giving the public some information on the performance of their graduates will help.
I’m looking at you , University of Phoenix.