The American Enterprise Institute, the Progressive Policy Institute, and the National Council on Teacher Quality October 2003
The American Enterprise Institute, in conjunction with the Progressive Policy Institute and the National Council on Teacher Quality, held an uncommonly interesting conference last week. While you needed to be there to get the full flavor of what discussants and audience had to say, and while many revisions doubtless lie between drafting and publishing, drafts of the ten papers worked over at the conference are available on line and at least a few repay attention. In two longish overview papers, Stanford's Heidi Ramirez and PPI's Andy Rotherham and Sara Mead chronicle the evolution of the federal and state roles vis-??-vis teacher quality. Four papers (by Bryan Hassel, Michael Podgursky, Kate Walsh, and Gary Sykes) propound new (well, more or less new) models of teacher preparation and licensure. And in a path breaking analysis of actual content of teacher-prep courses in elite ed schools (based on course syllabi in foundations, psychology, reading and math), Boston University's David Steiner finds that "The schools of education we reviewed are neither preparing teachers adequately to use the concrete findings of the best research in education, nor are they providing their students with a thoughtful and academically rich background in the fundamentals of what it means to be an outstanding educator." You can find the papers - remember, they're drafts, to be revised based on conference discussion and authors' second thoughts - at http://www.aei.org/events/eventID.624,filter.,type.past/event_detail.asp
