If it all sounds revolutionary, it’s supposed to. In its promotional materials, Relay uses fiery terms to describe its mission, promising to train schoolteachers in a way that “explodes the traditional, course-based paradigm that has been adopted by traditional schools of education over the past century.” Norman Atkins, the founder of a network of charter schools and the president of Relay, talks about his program as being beyond ideology, a word he believes has a negative connotation.
“The messiah is not going to come in the blink of an eye,” Mr. Atkins said recently. But he hopes, he said, to help bring about a future in which teachers and schools use instructional techniques that are known to work and are held accountable for student performance, two core tenets of Relay.
Mr. Atkins’s goal of upending teacher training stems from a broader diagnosis shared by many who work in public education: that it is failing millions of American children, leaving them without the skills they need to succeed in the 21st century. Vastly improving teacher education, they believe, is critical in fixing that picture.
There are wide concerns that too many teachers are unprepared for the classroom, though they may have more educational credentials than ever before. Master’s degrees are required for permanent certification in only a few states, including New York and Kentucky. But data collected by the National Center for Education Statistics show that 52 percent of kindergarten through eighth-grade teachers have a master’s degree or higher — which often qualifies them for a pay bump. And so graduate school in education is big business. In the 2008-9 school year, the 178,564 master’s degrees in education that were awarded across the country accounted for 27 percent of all the master’s degrees awarded.
Over the years, some of the toughest critics of education schools have been educators themselves. In 1986, the Holmes Group, a collection of deans from education schools, warned that too many schools were indifferent to the importance of hands-on teacher preparation. Their curriculums were outmoded, and their standards for admission and graduation were lax. Major research universities accorded them a low priority. Twenty years later, Arthur Levine, the former dean of Teachers College at Columbia University, argued in a scathing report called “Educating School Teachers” that most of those problems still held true.
“While there are some wonderful teaching schools,” he told me recently, “there are some that place students at failing schools with failing teachers to learn how to teach. There are some in which the professors are really far behind the times. There is enough bad practice to justify getting rid of the bottom of the field.”
But even those calling for reform face a problem, Dr. Levine said: There is little research into what kind of training is most likely to produce a successful teacher, a fact that social scientists are now working to remedy through long-term study.
In the meantime, states, which set the rules for certifying educators, are taking an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink approach to reform, raising the standards for existing schools while opening the door to new kinds of organizations, from online schools to charter school networks to museums, to train their teachers.
For example, New York invited nonacademic institutions to apply for $12.5 million in grants to develop and offer “clinically rich” master’s degree programs in teacher preparation. Among the 11 winning proposals, which were announced earlier this month, are the American Museum of Natural History, which already has a doctoral program in biology, along with Fordham University, Mercy College and two campuses of the City University of New York.
These changes come as large numbers of teachers already bypass traditional education degrees, entering classrooms with temporary licenses after as little as several weeks or months of pre-service training.
Today, about 500,000 of the nation’s 3.6 million teachers have entered the field through these alternative routes, such as Teach for America, mostly to work in public schools in high-poverty areas.
Even Arne Duncan, President Obama’s secretary of education, has joined in questioning traditional teacher education, advising districts in a speech last year to rethink the practice of rewarding teachers with a raise for a master’s degree, because “there is little evidence teachers with master’s degrees improve student achievement more than other teachers.”
Education schools, particularly those that offer top-notch training, might be excused for feeling they are under attack.
“The rhetoric is enormously heated,” Dr. Levine said, speaking from his office at the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, where as president he helps universities restructure their teaching programs. “We have a group of education schools that are perplexed at why they are being so criticized,” he said. “We have states saying they are going to create alternate routes to becoming a teacher, and they are going to increase standards for the existing education schools.
“We are simultaneously trying to reform and replace the enterprise.”
Sharon Otterman covers New York City public education for The Times.
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