October 25, 2009
Teaching teachers
NRO's John J Miller tackles a pet peeve of mine, the low quality of teacher training with its mindless hours of pedagogical instead of subject matter instruction, and in the process he brings to our attention Secretary of Education Arne Duncan's preposterous suggestions about what he thinks is wrong about teacher training:
This isn't precisely the problem Secretary of Education Arne Duncan took on this week in a speech at Columbia's Teachers College, but he was strongly critical of the way our country prepares teachers:Yet, by almost any standard, many if not most of the nation's 1,450 schools, colleges, and departments of education are doing a mediocre job of preparing teachers for the realities of the 21st century classroom. ... For decades, schools of education have been renowned for being cash cows for universities. The large enrollment in education schools and their relatively low overhead have made them profit-centers. But many universities have diverted those profits to more prestigious but under-enrolled graduate departments like physics-while doing little to invest in rigorous educational research and well-run clinical training.Wow.
The Obama cabinet is beyond parody.