Like any good teacher, I try to spend the waning days of summer sorting through my desk, taking inventory of the past year and preparing for the next.
A few weeks ago, I was sifting through the mountain of papers, studies and newspaper clippings that had accumulated there, when I came across a booklet titled “Building a Profession: Strengthening Teacher Preparation and Induction.”
The booklet, published by the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) more than a decade ago, summarizes a report from an AFT task force appointed to look at teacher preparation and how to improve it. Thumbing through it now, I was struck by how timely our task force’s observations and recommendations still are.
This is both good and bad. It’s good that many of the suggestions of our task force, which
