Reforming Teacher Education: Something Old, Something New

Teacher education has been subject to both scathing criticism and innumerable efforts designed to reform it or to save it from being dismantled. One of the latest and most well funded efforts aimed at teacher education reform is boldly titled Teachers for a New Era (TNE). Eleven colleges and universities of various types nationwide were selected to participate in TNE. The TNE initiative emphasizes evidence-based decisionmaking, close collaboration between education and arts and sciences faculty, and teaching as an academically taught clinical-practice profession.

The RAND Corporation and the Manpower Research Demonstration Corporation followed and evaluated the TNE initiative from October 2002 to September 2005, conducting on-site interviews with TNE grantees. The authors place TNE in the larger context of teacher education reform and critically examine the process by which reform will result in highly qualified teachers capable of producing improvements in student learning. They also examine TNE’s contributions to the grantee institutions’ teacher education programs and organizational culture and assess the sustainability of TNE beyond the life of the grant.