Teacher Education in America

Until approximately the first third of the nineteenth century, the notion that prospective schoolteachers needed formal preparatory training for their work, apart from whatever regular academic studies they might have pursued, would have attracted scant attention and even less popular support. Even after the mid-1800s, the overwhelming majority of people would have found anything much resembling the modern idea of teacher education wholly unnecessary and likely incomprehensible. It is helpful to recall, perhaps, that throughout the colonial and early republican periods, only a minuscule proportion of the population attended any school whatsoever. Among those who did, attendance was apt to be both brief and irregular; and formal learning beyond the most rudimentary level was rarely deemed important to success in the trades and agrarian occupations most people were destined to pursue. Hence, the thought or expectation that a classroom pedagogue might require formal preparation for the lowly task of instructing schoolchildren would have been quite unthinkable.

Accompanying dramatic increases in the numbers of students attending school at the turn of the century and beyond was an enduring, always troublesome, teacher shortage. In the year 1890, according to official estimates, some 14.1 million youngsters were enrolled in American schools; of these, more than half a million were attending secondary institutions (including 357,800 or so in public high schools and the remainder—about 142,000—in private schools). In 1930, four decades later, school enrollments had reached 23.5 million, including an estimated 4.5 to 4.7 million in public and private high schools. By 1940, the secondary enrollment total alone exceeded 7.1 million. Elementary enrollments between 1900 and 1930, meanwhile, had increased on average nearly 14 percent each decade.

Practically everyone writing on the topic of teacher preparation nowadays acknowledges some degree of discontent with existing training programs on all sides. It has always been open season on teacher education; and today, as in the past, detractors are free with criticism. David F. Labaree of Michigan State University comments: “Everyone seems to have something bad to say about the way we prepare our teachers. If you believe what you read and what you hear, a lot of what is wrong with American education these days can be traced to the failings of teachers and to shortcomings in the processes by which we train them for their tasks. We are told that students are not learning, that productivity is not growing, that economic competitiveness is declining—all to some extent because teachers don’t know how to teach.”¹

Recent proposals to locate preservice teacher education exclusively or at least partly at the postbachelor’s level are not necessarily new. Their precedents date back at least as far as the opening years of the twentieth century. The reform thrust of the early 1900s, it will be recalled, was to establish teachers’ colleges and to create training units fully coordinate with other academic departments in existing colleges. More important still was the movement to elevate normal departments within universities and place them on the same footing as other constituent departments, schools, and colleges. Among leading reformers were many who sought to emphasize university-based postgraduate instruction for an elite class of educational leaders. Also, the idea that preservice teacher preparatory programs likewise should be located at the graduate level was sometimes advanced. Only after completing a bachelor’s degree, some claimed, should candidates be admitted to a course of specialized training leading to initial licensure.

Authority for teacher licensure and certification by specialty areas rests ultimately with the 50 separate states. State education agencies, variously constituted and designated by legislative action, bear statutory responsibility for defining minimal requirements for entry into teaching. Directly or indirectly, virtually all state regulations go further in establishing basic criteria or standards to which teachers’ preparatory programs must conform.¹ Requirements are apt to vary considerably from state to state, differing from one another both in terms of how they are organized and according to their specific provisions.²

Atraditional method of evaluating a teacher education program relies on follow-up data supplied by recent graduates. Those polled are asked to complete a survey, providing judgments as to the worth of the program and its various courses in helping former students in their new teaching positions.¹ Program assessments of this type have become quite common. Dorothy H. Mayne, for example, reported the results of an extensive survey undertaken by the University of Alaska to improve its teacher-training program and services to teachers using an instrument completed by 52 principals and teachers in 46 rural Alaskan high schools.² Similar in purpose was a study of the Master of Education degree program in Special Education at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.³ Data collected both from students and from teachers who were program graduates were utilized to revise the content of certain courses, to change the overall pattern of courses required, and to modify preservice student teaching assignments.

The claim that people aspiring to become elementary or secondary classroom instructors need formal preparation for their work, it is abundantly apparent, has yet to win universal acceptance at the close of the twentieth century. Every so often, an editorialist or a self-styled critic brandishing a book with an inflammatory title such as The Collapse of American Education, How Our Schools Are Failing and Why the Crisis Is Worsening will attract wide attention by rehearsing the claim that teacher education is bankrupt. Instructional acts are natural occurrences in the repertoire of human behaviors, runs the argument; and there were teachers long before someone seized upon the curious notion they needed to be trained in order to exercise abilities they—and practically everyone else—already possess.¹