Hmmm, once you’ve taken on the tasks of educating trainee teachers to teach, prepare curriculum, and manage a classroom, I think you’ve already got enough material to justify a college of education.

It strikes me that teaching is a separate profession of its own, at least as worthy of specialised schooling as engineering or medicine. Eg, at engineering school we studied physics and maths, but we studied them in the context of engineering, we learnt how to apply physics and maths to specific engineering problems, we learnt cool solutions previous engineers had come up in the past to engineering problems, and we learnt general rules about design, about testing, about ethics, etc. We also had specific courses on things like project management and first aid. An engineer doesn’t just need to know physics, they need to know how to design, build and test a new solution. And it really helps to not just learn the theory, but what clever uses people have made of it in the past. There was more than enough material for a 3 year degree. And I left not merely knowing things, but having had my thinking changed towards that desired by the profession – for example I was left with a compulsion to test every new design first.

If we were to properly train would-be teachers to teach, along the lines that engineers are trained, an education school focused at high school teachers would be covering things like “how do kids fail to learn calculus, and how you can avoid those problems”, “identifying kids who need eyesight testing”, “signs of the poor reader trying to hide their problem”, “how to deal with abusive behaviour”, and training teachers to incorporate feedback in their lessons and to adjust the lessons on the fly in response to that feedback. (This is not merely educating teachers that they should be using feedback, it’s something they should be doing almost without thinking about it, like the difference between learning driving theory and learning to drive). I would be amazed if you could have a college of education that was effective at training good teachers without including lots of practice for its students.

I am well aware that a number of colleges of education fail at this sort of professional education, I am here talking about what colleges of education could be like, and what I am inclined to think should be like (but am not dead sure), as opposed to what they are actually like.

They also serve the interests of school boards and administration by providing a defensible approximation of competence in the teachers they hire.

By hiring graduates of ed schools who are certified, parents and tax payers are provided with some reason to believe those teachers are competent. After all, they’ve just spent four years or thereabouts, in college learning everything there is to know about teaching and received the certification stamp of approval. How could they be anything but competent?

But it’s a mutually beneficial relationship.

The ed schools get to outrageously inflate the cost of the instruction necessary to learn to become a teacher, thus increasing their importance and influence.

You can see this operating most clearly in the value placed on advanced degrees from ed schools in that an EdD is only worthwhile in the pursuit of a bigger paycheck not, as is implied, the development of greater teaching skill. If an increase in teaching skill were the primary reason for the acquisition of an advanced degree there’d a need to prove the value of the degree in the educational attainments of the students enjoying the benefit of those greater skills.

I really do not understand why the schools of education are needed.

I welcome all thoughts and comments.

Elizabeth

High school teachers don’t just need to be subject matter experts, they also need to know how to teach their subject. At university there are plenty of professors who know far more about their subject than even their PhD students, but are hopeless teachers as they don’t understand how anyone could *not* get whatever their speciality is or because they forgot how much they were taught in the past.

This is not to say that existing education schools actually add anything to teachers’ effectiveness, any feedback between what education college professors teach and what happens in new teachers’ classrooms appears to be minimal at best.

> Charter schools were specifically exempted from many regulations in order to help them along. I think that if being exempted from regulations is good for charter schools, why isn’t it a good idea for public schools?

Charter schools are public schools. They just aren’t *district* public schools. The burden charters *don’t* have to carry is the burden of unnecessary administrative overhead.

You left out the fact that college teachers/instructors/professors don’t have to be certified as teachers, nor endure the slings and arrows of the pursuit of formal education credentials. All they have to do is convince their employer that they are proficient in the subject they wish to teach to get a foot in the academic door.

You are absolutely right in acknowledging that college students are primarily composed of volunteers who know that misbehavior has a consequence.

Consider how much more effective, competent and competitive our educators would be if they had the same standards and salary opportunities as college and university educators.

If education costs money, and I don’t see many teachers volunteering to work for free, education is a business.

Pay for results is coming to public education. If you don’t think that it should, you get to explain why you think that education should get more money. If you think that results can’t be measured, you get to explain why we shouldn’t replace teachers with low-cost babysitters. (If results can’t be measured, there’s no point in paying more for better.)

Note that one way to get the constraints out of the way of teachers is to penalize organizations that don’t deliver and give the money to organizations that do.

It certainly won’t make for better teachers or teaching, but I wouldn’t complain.

Eliminating federal income taxes would amount to a massive federal subsidy to the states. I’m sure a 40 to 45 percent increase in take-home pay would stimulate something, just not sure what. More than likely it would stimulate a wage freeze or wage cut until after-tax pay drops to what it would have been without the tax cut.