Good Teacher Candidates Allow For Good Education Schools and Vice Versa � The Quick and the Ed

Good Teacher Candidates Allow For Good Education Schools and Vice Versa � The Quick and the Ed

Good Teacher Candidates Allow For Good Education Schools and Vice Versa

by Kevin Carey

In speaking at this year’s New Schools Schmooze-A-Thon, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan was asked about teacher preparation. “I don’t care where teachers come from,” he replied, while stressing the need to attract more talented people into the profession and do a better job of evaluating their performance once they arrive. In other words, Duncan doesn’t believe people necessarily need to go through a university-based training program in order to teach. In this, he’s firmly in mainstream of pundit / wonk thinking. The non-essential nature of schools of education isn’t a point of debate in the contemporary education policy conversation. It’s shared assumption from which debates proceed.
But in talking with a colleague this afternoon about the Finnish education junket I took a couple of years ago, I was reminded of something I wish I had explored more fully at the time: the entanglement of the teacher candidate recruitment problem and the education school quality problem. These issues are usually considered separately, but in fact I think they’re not far from being one in the same.

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