By Sharon Noguchi
Here are excerpts of what teachers, teacher educators and others in education say about the U.S. proposal to toughen regulation of teacher-training programs and to grade them on test scores of the students of their graduates.
“Research confirms that the most important in-school factor in a student’s success is a strong teacher … Yet today, far too many teachers report they are unprepared when they first enter the classroom after completing their teacher preparation program.”
— U.S. Department of Education. “Improving Teacher Preparation: Building on Innovation”
“What if airplane pilots said, ‘my first three years were a wreck’? We worry about the safety of people at the hands of these other professions. Why don’t we worry about children being at the hands of an adult, even a well-meaning adult, who doesn’t know what he or she is doing?”