Remind me, please:

Why do education reformers always talk about 1) resources, 2) teacher incentives and quality, but rarely about 3) teacher training? dianaelaine717, I'm looking at you.

This boils down to: Why, when we know we want to improve the skills of all the country's children, do we then turn around and say that we have to select teachers from Ivy League colleges? Why not apply that same principle to the idea of giving future teachers not just academic experience, but better training for dealing with kids and parents? A good college education does NOT, repeat NOT, cover even half the training one needs to be a teacher, and moreover, the talents that, say, an Ivy League college selects for in its students are not the same as the talents required to become a good teacher in a challenging school. This should be obvious: one needs charisma, ability (by personality or by background) to connect with (and thus lead) a broad variety of students, ability to creatively break things down into simple terms...

Wikipedia tells me that states started passing charter school laws in 1991. My mother was one of the founders of Princeton Charter School which opened in fall 1997 (6th grade for me), which was at the forefront of New Jersey charter schools. She always said that much of the point was to give local public schools (which in Princeton didn't have to expend much effort to get well-educated kids) an example to follow and a reason to care about competition. Certainly the recent national initiatives /after/ the No Child Left Behind Act share many ideas with PCS' founders, wherever those ideas come from. But speaking from what I know directly, in the Philadelphia district itself where I spent last year, charter schools come in different varieties, and provide examples that other schools and district administrators look at. I hear that in DC the entire public part of the district is trying to compete with charter schools. It's not so much that charter schools are a good thing in themselves, as that they can try out new methods some of which the districts would do well to adopt.

We all know about Teach for America, designed to send highly-educated college grads /without educational training/ into schools. This program has a lot in common with my own program of last year (City Year), in that it takes advantage of the fact that its participants are energetic young people who get a lot done before they run out of steam. Then there are alternative certification programs for college graduates career-changers, like various Teaching Fellows programs (e.g. DC), and there are programs that provide training with lots of time spent under a mentor, even summer feedback and reinforcement training for the first year or so of independent teaching.

What about the standard masters-of-education curricula? dianaelaine717 tells me the masters'-of-education program at UCSD is very good and involves a lot of student-teaching, but the teachers I talked to last year received mostly the latest theories of education and, tellingly, didn't know how to apply a new educational theory when they were presented with it.* I wish I knew more about this, but I don't think many education masters' programs are very good--indeed, they often scornfully dismissed as a joke.

Selecting talented teachers and rewarding them for good work is all very well...but when is the system of PRAXIS exams and certification requirements going to provide better mentoring, hands-on training, and guidance in charisma development for teachers? The whole /point/ of worrying about education is based on the premise that young adults need better education and support to succeed, not just incentive--well, so do teachers. Or /are/ there changes being made on a large scale?


*I was at a faculty meeting near the beginning of the year at which differentiated instruction (the idea being to give different kinds of tasks, or choice of them to different students to help them grasp the material at different levels), and it seemed that not one of the teachers there knew what to do with it when they were asked to come up with examples of implementations they might use. But maybe a month or two later, I started to see how some of the teachers were learning from each other's concrete examples, and "choice boards" of different activities started coming up. Of course, not all of them would communicate in this way: any of you who know about the stratification of my school into a "good" third and a "bad" two-thirds, note that I only /saw/ this spread in the "good" third.