This is an era of transformation in the preparation, induction, and assessment of prospective teachers. The tension between local and state control is at the heart of the debate. States should be responsible for establishing performance standards that ensure that new teachers are well-prepared, competent, and ready to teach. This is why the…

Recently adopted state standards for middle grades and high school mathematics content have an increased emphasis on statistical topics. With this change, teacher education programs may need to adapt how they prepare preservice secondary mathematics teachers (PSMTs) to teach statistics and require measures related to statistics teaching to assess…

The U.S. Department of Education Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP) is dedicated to improving results for infants, toddlers, children, and youth with disabilities ages birth through 21 by providing leadership and financial support to assist institutions of higher education (IHEs), states, and local districts. During a 5-year period, OSEP…

The field of teacher preparation is falling short of its most important responsibility: ensuring that the teachers we train are ready to do the job. For more than a decade,TNTP preparation programs produced teachers who were no more or less effective than teachers from any other program-- some were great, some were poor, most were about average.…

This paper revisits existing experimental work on Teach For America (TFA) and extends it by examining treatment effects across the distribution of student achievement. TFA is a rapidly expanding teacher preparation program that currently serves over half a million students in low-income districts across the country. Previous research results did…

Improving teacher preparation is critical to long-term improvement in teacher quality. More than 200,000 new teachers enter classrooms each year. Increasing student enrollment, the retirement of baby boom generation teachers, and high attrition in their first five years (between 40 and 50 percent of new teachers leave the profession) have…

This article describes the University of Consortium for Catholic Education (UCCE) as an example of collaboration between Catholic colleges, universities, schools, and other stakeholders. The UCCE supports a collaborative cadre of primarily Catholic colleges and universities as they design and implement graduate-level teaching service programs for…

This article examines the current and potential contributions of the University Consortium for Catholic Education (UCCE) to both K-12 and higher Catholic education. In order to situate the development of alternative teacher preparation programs, a history of Catholic teacher formation is addressed followed by a brief summary of the existing…