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Report Urges Better Training for Teachers
By Hans Johnson
A new report on teacher education released by the American Council on Education (ACE) in October calls for more scrupulous accreditation and better funding of the programs that train U.S. teachers. The report, To Touch the Future, underscores the dearth of qualified teachers in the nation’s public schools and the lack of professional support for existing teachers. Already facing dilapidated facilities in some districts, many teachers, according to the report, feel ill prepared to incorporate new technology into their classes, even when such resources are available.
The report urges college and university presidents to move teacher-training programs from the margins to the center of their curricula. "It either ought to be in the center of the institutional mission or they should move it out," ACE president Stanley Ikenberry told the New York Times. The report also proposes a tenfold increase in annual contributions from the federal government to educational research, from current levels of $300 million to $3 billion.
A call less likely to win instant fans among educators is the report’s insistence on better monitoring and evaluating of teacher-education programs. Still, Sandra Feldman, president of the American Federation of Teachers, seemed to second the motion by saying, "Teaching is hard. We haven’t had that kind of rigor in most teacher-education programs at all." Findings and proposals outlined in the report reinforce arguments made by Feldman and others in the January–February 1999 issue of Academe, "Educating Our Teachers," which alerted higher-education faculty to the looming shortage of public school teachers. The boom of school-age children from Generation Y and the lure of high salaries from other fields have exacerbated the shortage.
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