Reforming Teacher Education, Again

WORKFORCE AND WORKPLACE Reforming Teacher Education, Again Schools of education have been portrayed as intellectual wastelands, decried as impractical and irrelevant by practitioners, and cited as the root cause of bad teaching and inadequate learning. Teacher education as a whole has been the target of innumerable eff orts designed to reform it or save it from being dismantled. In 2001, Carnegie Corporation of New York took on the challenge of reforming teacher education by launching an ambitious initiative, Teachers for a New Era (TNE), aimed at bringing about radical changes in the way teachers are prepared for their profession. To assist institutions of higher education in this endeavor, Carnegie, joined by the Annenberg Foundation and Ford Foundation, is making awards of $5 million over a period of fi ve years to each of several institutions. Th e fi rst cohort of grantees, selected in April 2002, includes Bank Street College of Education in New York City; California State University, Northridge; Michigan State University; and the University of Virginia. Th e second cohort of grantees, selected in summer 2003, includes Boston College, Florida A&M University, Stanford University, the University of Connecticut, the University of Texas at El Paso, the University of Washington, and the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. Th e grantees were chosen to be representative of the various types of institutions that prepare teachers. Th ey include public and private institutions, large research universities, comprehensive universities, a standalone college of education, institutions that prepare large numbers of minority teachers, and small and large producers of teachers. Th e Rockefeller, Nellie Mae Education, and Ford Foundations funded a study by the RAND Corporation and Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation to evaluate TNE. Th e study combined a broad look at implementation across all 11 TNE sites with more detailed, in-depth case studies of eight of the sites (the four grantees from the fi rst cohort and Boston College, the University of Connecticut, Florida A&M University, and the University of Texas at El Paso from the second cohort). While the long-term objective of the evaluation is to provide evidence of whether the initiative has been “successful” from the point of view of both the individual institutions and the TNE funders, in the short term, the evaluation seeks to examine the extent to which the grantees are implementing Carnegie’s design principles and to understand the factors that foster or hinder TNE implementation. Th e RAND monograph, Reforming Teacher Education: Something Old, Something New, documents the results of that evaluation. As of September 2005, the fi rst cohort had been implementing TNE for three years and the second cohort for two years. Th e monograph is based primarily on information collected during annual site visits, the sites’ annual reports and TNE renewal application materials, literature reviews, and Web site searches. Th e monograph seeks to place the TNE initiative in the larger context of the current politics surrounding teacher education and other reform eff orts, to understand the evidence base underlying TNE’s major design principles, and to provide an overview of the sites’ progress This product is part of the RAND Corporation research brief series. RAND research briefs present policy-oriented summaries of individual published, peer-reviewed documents or of a body of published work.