Do Education Schools Prepare Teachers to Teach?

Classical educators have long been concerned about whether teacher’s colleges have been producing teachers who are qualified to teach in a classical school. School leaders often state that it is easier to hire a teacher from another profession because “they have less to unlearn.”

The Pope Center for Higher Education Policy is concerned too, though not just for classical schools. They have produced a report for North Carolina called Univesity of North Carolina Education Schools: Helping or Hindering Potential Teachers?. Here’s a summary from their web site.

This paper looks at a major problem found in schools of education throughout the country, including the UNC system. That is the overemphasis on what is sometimes called “student-centered learning,” but is also known as “progressivism” and “constructivism.” As this report reveals, that approach to learning has major weaknesses when it comes to teaching potential teachers.

To learn more, click HERE to visit their website.

The NAS web site is also concerned about what our teacher’s colleges are producing. NCATE is the leading accreditor of education schools and they have just annointed a new president. Here’s what they say at NAS about NCATE and the ed schools they accredit:

Ask what’s wrong with American K-12 schooling, and a disproportionately large part of the answer comes down to schools of education that systematically mis-prepare would-be teachers for their careers. Ask why schools of education are so terrible, and NCATE looms as a significant part of the answer. NCATE is, with no real exaggeration, the enemy of those who hope to restore good, substantive teaching in America’s schools. By and large, it favors “process” over substance, trendy pedagogy over sound practice, psychological adjustment over cultivated self-control, and social messaging over objective knowledge.

Sounds familiar. Read the rest of their article HERE.