All Teachers should be (M)asters

Although I was gratified to read The New York Times' description of Finland's high school curriculum as "one of the most rigorous . . . in the world, including physics, chemistry, biology, philosophy, music and at least two foreign languages" - words that could easily describe the curriculum where I teach, minus the philosophy - I was even more interested to read a Q. and A. with Arthur Levine, a prominent U.S. teacher training critic, who advocates not only higher graduation standards for preservice teachers, but higher admissions standards for teacher training programs.

I don't see why teacher training should be an undergraduate program at all. Maybe I'm biased because, in so many of my recent classes to obtain my Ohio teaching license, I was the oldest person in the room (including the professor). But if no one can become a doctor or lawyer as an undergraduate, why should anyone be able to become a teacher with just a B.A.? I've never been able to figure out how 23 year-olds manage classrooms full of 17 and 18 year-olds anyway. It seems like, with few possible exceptions, a recipe for disaster.

Teacher training programs should only be open to Masters' candidates who already have a Bachelor's degree with at least a 3.25 GPA, or substantial life experience. There should be the teaching equivalent of the LSAT to get in as well, measuring general aptitude for the teaching profession, with questions describing difficult teaching situations and asking the candidate to choose among four possible approaches to enhance the learning of the greatest numbers of students.

The problem is that, with fewer teacher license candidates and fewer undergrads majoring in education, schools of education won't have the power or prestige they now enjoy. At my teaching alma mater, the whole department recently moved into a spanking new building with fancy, interactive computer monitors at the entrance telling you where each professor's office is located.

That building was paid for in part by some of my fellow teacher candidates: English teacher hopefuls who couldn't punctuate their sentences in formal style during an e-learning chat, candidates for licenses in grades 4-9 who used "their" for "there," and aspiring math teachers who stopped doing any class assignments after Halloween. There were just as many hardworking students who simply did not understand our education textbooks, and who kept their grades up by parroting back the chapter we were supposed to read that week instead of taking the advice it gave to heart, or thinking critically about it.

We were all paying the same tuition, and part of that money inevitably flowed into the new building. As any teacher worth her salt knows, behavior that is rewarded gets repeated. Too many "Schools of Education" within U.S. universities are being richly rewarded for taking all comers, regardless of their abilities or their future students' needs.