Teacher Training Programs: The Winds of Change

Calling scores of education school programs “mediocre,” Education Secretary Arne Duncan on Thursday implored universities to significantly change the way they prepare teachers to run classrooms, saying a “revolutionary change” was needed to train as many as one million new teachers in five years.

“By almost any standard, many if not most of the nation’s 1,450 schools, colleges and departments of education are doing a mediocre job of preparing teachers for the realities of the 21st-century classroom,” he said.

David M. Steiner, the new state education commissioner, was previously dean of the education school at Hunter College, and has made similar critiques of traditional training programs. When he was appointed in July, he said the fact that the state’s licensing exam had a pass rate of more than 90 percent showed that the bar was too low.

You can read the full article here.