The article, summed up in the last paragraph:

The Teach for America alumni assumed they already had a seat at the table, and a genuine voice in policy creation. The student teachers in Michigan were just trying to get hired.

One amendment offered by Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., would have removed the requirement that teachers of students with disabilities be “highly qualified”.

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Another proposal that died in the committee came from Sen. Johnny Isakson, R-Ga. He wanted to do away with limits on how many students with disabilities could take alternate tests, which are different than those their classmates take.

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“The underlying concern we have with Isakson and Paul [is that their message is] ‘It’s too difficult to accommodate you, so let’s separate you,” Jones said. “When that happens, it’s separate but not equal. It’s not a 21st century vision of society.”

In his research, Keith C. Barton, an education professor at Indiana University, argues that preservice teachers need to expand their understanding of their roles as teachers. He writes that teachers must model and teach civic engagement, and that while teacher-preparation programs can help inculcate those values and skills, most don’t.

As I’ve mentioned before, my teacher prep program is not like other programs. Because the focus is on urban education, we look at issues of poverty, race, gender, social justice, and society. It’s not something just the social studies people talk about - it’s important to everyone. And I think that’s what this article is saying, if I’m not reading too much into it: all preservice teachers should be learning about civics instruction, not just the social studies teachers. Because civics affects daily life. It’s kind of like literacy, for which I took the class Teaching Literacy in the Content Areas, where regardless of our concentration we had to learn reading and writing methods.

What are your thoughts on the state of civics education?

They found that students in schools that are closed due to poor performance actually do substantially worse on reading and math tests in the new school to which they are sent for at least a year, and then recover and end up doing about as well as they were doing at their original school. In other words, after all the expense, acrimony, and heartache involved in closing a school, the students involved do not benefit.

Teacher colleges need to give aspiring educators much more thorough, intense exposure to K-12 classrooms during their training—and set higher standards for admission—a group representing state school boards contends.

The National Association of State Boards of Education, in a report released today, says that experience in actual classroom settings, as well as continued mentoring once teachers are on the job, are critical to keeping top-notch educators in the job.

But the report also says that the admissions standards for many teachers’ colleges are unacceptably low—they may not, for instance, require minimum test scores or grade-point averages—and many of them draw candidates from the bottom two-thirds of their college classes.

Really? Where is this? I don’t know of any teacher prep programs that don’t have minimum GPA requirements and test scores.

(The authors did conclude, however, that boosting teacher salaries, in addition to improving working conditions, would likely lure more graduates from the top-third of college classes into the profession.)

Yes, this would help. Why become a teacher if you could make so much more money doing… any other white collar job?

The report also urges state school boards to work with teacher-licensing boards to align certification requirements and evaluation standards, and ensure that there is a system in place to monitor the quality of teacher-education programs.

Are there states that don’t monitor teacher education programs? How is that possible? Doesn’t the state board of education or department of ed or whatever have a responsibility to do that? I would have assumed every state had a process for certifying teacher prep programs and monitoring them.

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Now, admittedly I’m rather new to the education field as a whole, and am only familiar with my little corner of it here in Minnesota. I’ve heard that our requirements are higher than other states (you can take a license from our state and easily teach in another, but not necessarily the other way around) - I don’t have any proof to back that up, but that’s what I’ve heard.

And I’m really only familiar the requirements of the specific school/teacher prep program that I’m in, and so maybe other schools and other states don’t require nearly as much as my school does.

But here’s what I do know (based on the state I live in - Minnesota, the school I attend, and the program requirements specific to my concentration of 5-12 social studies).

To be admitted to the program, you need at least a 2.5 GPA and have 40 hours working with youth. (My undegrad GPA is 3.9.) You also have to have 2 recommendations, write an essay, and other stuff that I assume all programs would require.

Before student teaching, you must complete all coursework with at least a 2.5 GPA (2.75 for us graduates, mine is 4.0 for the graduate coursework), pass the new Minnesota versions of the Praxis (because we’re too good to use the national stuff and had to write our own), and complete at least 100 classroom hours.

And then there’s the electronic portfolio, the actual student teaching, the new licensure requirements they keep adding (like now we have to submit videos)….

I gotta be honest - if it’s easier in other states, I kinda wish I lived there. Maybe I’d be done by now and teaching. They keep adding new requirements on the path to licensure, and I’m «this close» to saying screw it all (except that I only have one class and student teaching left, so that’d be stupid to do).

And if I can, just for a moment, weigh in on another side of the picture… perhaps it is not in our children’s best interest to have only geniuses and 4.0 grads teaching them. I’ve met a lot of smart people who couldn’t teach worth a darn, and who could barely hold an intelligent conversation outside of their area of specialty (and within their area of specialty, they were so advanced that unless you were also a genius, you were pretty much lost). Will the creme-de-la-creme be able to empathize with the student getting a D+, be able to understand and help him/her improve, or will they just insist that everyone should be able to get As?

I’m not saying we should put flunkies in front of our kids. That’s not the path to success. And I do want teachers to be viewed as professionals, much in the way doctors are (that metaphor has been floating around quite a bit). But in the same way that not all doctors go to Harvard Medical School, not all teachers need to be top of their class.

And, as it was brought up in a class by another student, the more requirements you have, the harder you make them, the more hoops you have to jump through (and money required for many of those hoops), the less diverse the graduates will be (actually, what he said was that minority students, of which he was one, would be deterred by all the crap they keep throwing at us). And it’s been proven that 1) minority students learn better from minority teachers, 2) our student bodies are increasingly diverse, and 3) we haven’t yet figured out how to close the achievement gap.

I’m not saying that it would be a wholly bad thing to raise the requirements for teacher prep programs. What I am saying is that there may be unforseen repercussions.

Did I overreact? Anyone want to weigh in on this?

Recommendation 3: Reform education to ensure that all students, including young men of color, are college and career ready when they graduate from high school.

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Recommendation 4: Improve teacher education programs and provide professional development that includes cultural- and gender-responsive training.

…The latest in a series of actions intended to draw attention to school discipline practices that some consider overly harsh or punishments that are meted out disproportionately among students of different races, genders, and ethnic groups.

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He said raising awareness about the disparities is crucial, and training in multicultural competence should be combined with training in classroom-management and strategies such as positive behavioral interventions and supports. This intervention-and-supports model is a decisionmaking framework that guides the selection, integration, and implementation of evidence-based interventions for improving academic and behavior outcomes for all students.

In many ethnically diverse school districts across the country, teachers in schools that serve the top quintile of African-American and Latino students are paid significantly less—approximately $2,500 per year—than the average teacher in such districts, according to an analysis released today by the U.S. Department of Education’s office for civil rights.

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Fifty-nine percent of the districts studied showed these spending disparities. And because teacher salaries make up about 60 percent or so of the typical district’s budget, these data demonstrate some fairly hefty gaps in spending between schools that serve more students of color and those that serve fewer such students.

“America has been battling inequity in education for decades but these data show that we cannot let up,” said U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan. “Children who need the most too often get the least. It’s a civil rights issue, an economic security issue, and a moral issue.”

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Various advocates have been pushing for changes to the “comparability” test in the federal Title I program for disadvantaged students. Basically, to get Title I, districts have to show that local spending between high- and low-poverty schools is equal before those districts get their Title I allocations.

But they’re currently allowed to exempt salary differentials from the calculation, in essence papering over these pay disparities.

However, even the best teachers cannot make students learn if they don’t want to. This is not an excuse; it is an explanation. Non-public schools have the right to expel students who consistently fail to do the work assigned. But public schools can’t.

The combination of recent budget crunches that led to cutbacks in nontested areas; federal officials’ rhetoric about the importance of science, technology, engineering, and math, known as the STEM subjects; and the exclusion of social studies from the common-core-standards movement has made social studies teachers feel their subjects have been “marginalized,” Ms. Swan said.

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So far, the group has agreed on a one-sentence definition of K-12 social studies: “The social studies is an interdisciplinary exploration of the social sciences and humanities, including civics, history, economics, and geography, in order to develop responsible, informed, and engaged citizens and to foster civic, global, historical, geographic, and economic literacy.”