Fascinating article on teacher education

I just happened to be visiting in the Cleveland area and I saw the Sunday Plain Dealer. On the front page was an outstanding article about the problems with teacher education programs. Here's how it starts:

"Imagine that commercial airline pilots were trained in schools where almost everyone who applied was admitted.

Imagine that their instructors had not been in a cockpit for decades and rarely spoke with active pilots about new equipment or cutting-edge techniques.

And imagine that those mythical training schools operated within an accreditation system that failed to ensure quality and rarely disciplined failure.

Fasten your seat belt.

That imaginary scenario is all too close to the way critics describe the training that America's teachers receive -- on average -- at the nation's 1,200 college- and university-based teacher education programs."

Read the rest of it here: http://blog.cleveland.com/pdextra/2008/05/research_questions_quality_of.html
and here: http://blog.cleveland.com/pdextra/2008/05/how_different_are_alternative.html
and here: http://www.cleveland.com/teacherprep/