college of education

Not so shocking revelation from the Cleveland Plain Dealer on colleges of education. To me, it is amazing that this issue has not outraged more parents and students. (Note that there are always exceptions and there are many schools working to improve and all people who generalize are jerks). We do not have a lot of exceptional Education schools in the US and we cannot have a world class teaching workforce if we aren’t more selective of who gets in the classroom.

The next few blogs will be about solutions to teacher shortages. Many of the opponents to alternative teacher certification like to play the doctor/lawyer/nurse card when defending the current system of preparing and certifying teachers. They say that you would never allow lawyers or doctors to come into the profession through an alternative certification.

NCES statistics have been updated and the big story that everyone is covering is the dramatic increase in students - over 1 million new students reporting to schools. And on the teaching front there is barely a sound. Based on an average class size of 20, we would need 50,000 new teachers to handle this new work load and that is only to cover the new students - it doesn't even address the issue of teacher retirements and teachers changing careers.