Did your college train you well enough? The Government doesn't think so!

Are teacher colleges producing results or just cashing in? The new secretary of education, Arne Duncan, believes universities are making a ton of money off of the college of education and not reinvesting it back into the department. He believes most teacher colleges are putting out poor products and is ready to tie stimulus money to force colleges that train teachers in two key areas.
One area is classroom management, which happens to be our topic this week. The other complaint Duncan said he heard from recent graduates was they, “were not taught how to use data to improve instruction and boost student learning". These two areas were continually brought up as Duncan talked to hundreds of young teachers in the Chicago area.
The report in USA Today by the Associated Press cited A 2006 report found that three of five education school alumni said their training failed to prepare them to teach, the report was by Arthur Levine, a former Teachers College president. A couple of questions to my fellow bloggers are:

1. Do you feel your teaching college prepared you to teach in the area of classroom management, especially in high-needs classrooms?

2. Do you feel your teaching college prepared you to use data to improve instruction?

In response to the first one, I do not feel my teaching college prepared me as well as they could in the areas of classroom management, especially in the high-needs sector. One of the classes I had when I was student-teaching had 17 students with IEP’s with behavioral problems, low academic skills, and some that spoke limited English. It was a nightmare. Of course I had two teaching aids in there to help keep them on task but I was never trained for a classroom like this. I was told in theory by professors how to develop lesson plans but not what to do when one calls you a white F---er and I definitely wasn’t trained on what to do when you are waiting for security to come and remove them.
For the second question, I will admit my teaching college did require us to research topics and provided us with some examples of how to find data on educational topics. I cannot remember how or if we learned how to use it to improve instruction because I don’t recall doing a lot of “teaching” to my classmates for practice. To me that should have been in every college teaching class.
Moving back to the report Duncan did not solely blame the universities for the lack of well prepared teachers. “The government is also to blame, he said. Most states have paper-and-pencil licensing exams that measure basic skills and knowledge but not readiness for the classroom, he said, and local mentoring programs are lacking”.


The Secretary has an interesting solution to this problem. Duncan noted the administration is using stimulus dollars to reward states that tie student achievement data to the education schools where their teachers had credentials. His department also is helping to pay for an expansion of teacher residency programs in high-needs schools. I think this could be hard to track and I hope for the sake of future teachers the government does this fairly and then provides the colleges an opportunity to improve themselves.
Self-reflection is something every teacher learns to do at the end of the day and in this case so should some of institutions teaching that concept.  I am not asking that we tear apart our former alumni but they should be open to suggestions because in the end we all want great teachers in the classroom helping students.