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.

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.

………

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?

The study examined which education schools were tied to better student progress, without naming any particular aspect of training that the schools did differently.

…

The University of Washington study found that less than 1 percent of the differences between teachers seemed to be linked to where they got their training. But the programs from the best to the worst associated student test scores was roughly equivalent to a reduction in class size of between five and 10 students. So hiring a teacher from the best training program could be equivalent to shrinking a class by five to 10 students.

…

But he is quick to point out this research does not reveal why one teacher training program is superior to another. Part of the difference could be attributed to how selective a program is in choosing its students.

Interesting, but with no actual conclusions drawn, it’s hard to give this much credence. That’s not to say that I think the research is bad, but at this stage of the game, there’s nothing to do with this research other than file it away and hope that further research reveals actionable conclusions.

The idea is simple: the state pays top academic students to attend a public college, and in return they spend at least four years teaching in a public school.

In the 20 years since the first fellows began teaching, the program has flourished. High school seniors selected for the program average about 1,200 on the SATs compared with a state average of 1,000. Of the 500 fellows chosen each year, about a quarter are black or Hispanic.

“We decided teacher education consisted too much of reading about schools,” said Deborah Loewenberg Ball, dean of the School of Education. “You can’t learn to teach by reading. The curriculum needed to be much more about practice.”