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Educational Researcher
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The online version of this article can be found at:

DOI: 10.3102/0013189X034007003
2005 34: 3 EDUCATIONAL RESEARCHER
Marilyn Cochran-Smith
The New Teacher Education: For Better or for Worse?

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This article offers a reading of the current state of the eld of teacher
education, identifying current reforms, emerging trends, and new un-
derlying premises. The author argues that a new teacher education
has been emerging with three closely coupled pieces: It is con-
structed as a public policy problem, based on research and evidence,
and driven by outcomes. Illustrating and critiquing each of these
pieces, the article makes the case that the new teacher education is
both for the better and for the worse. The article concludes that ed-
ucation scholars who care about public education must challenge the
narrowest aspects of the emerging new teacher education, building
on its most promising aspects and working with others to change
the terms of the debate.
A
lthough the title of this article is The New Teacher Ed-
ucation, I begin by asking readers to think for a mo-
ment about the old teacher education or at least the
old teacher. According to a 1923 standard elementary teachers
contract (Apple, 1987), the teacher was expected not to get mar-
ried or associate with men, to be at home between 8:00 p.m. and
6:00 a.m., and not to leave town without permission from the
Chairman of the Board of Trustees. In addition, she was not per-
mitted to smoke, drink, or ride in a carriage or automobile with
any man except her father or brother. The teacher was expected
to keep the schoolroom tidy, scrub the oor once a week, and
start the re each day by 7:00 a.m. so the room would be warm
when the children arrived.
What is interesting here is that there are no references at all in
the 1923 contract to the obligation of the teacher to actually teach
anything to anyone, and the only reference to students is that they
be kept warm. Of course, the gendered aspects of teaching re-
ected in the old contract continue to have an impact, but there
are dramatically different expectations for teacher performance in
the 21st century. In fact, many people now assume that teachers
canand shouldteach all students to world-class standards, be
the linchpins in educational reforms of all kinds, and produce a
well-qualied labor force to preserve the U.S. position in the
global economy. In the face of these dauntingand arguable
2005 Presidential Address
The New Teacher Education: For Better or for Worse?
by Marilyn Cochran-Smith
expectations, the question of how the nations teachers are re-
cruited, prepared, and retained has become one of the hottest top-
ics in the public and academic discourse regarding education.
This article is about teacher education, a subject that has never
been the subject of an AERA presidential address. Although
there have been four or ve important addresses over the years
that were closely relatedon teacher knowledge and expertise,
teaching and learning in the new century, and professional de-
velopmentno presidential address has focused on teacher prepa-
ration per se. This article speaks to three questions:
What is the new teacher education and why is it important?
Is the new teacher education for better or for worse?
What is the role of the education research community?
In answer to these questions, I conclude that the new teacher
education is both for better and for worse. I also argue that, as
education scholars who care about public education, we must
challenge the narrowest aspects of the emerging teacher educa-
tion, build on its most promising aspects, and work with others
to change the terms of the debate about preparing teachers.
The New Teacher Education: Background
My identication and analysis of the new teacher education rests
on a multidisciplinary theoretical framework, which assumes that
in addition to operating at the intersections of research, policy, and
practice, teacher education can be understood as social, ideologi-
cal, rhetorical and political practice.
1
Examining teacher education
through social and ideological lenses means identifying the larger
social structures and purposes within which it is embedded, as well
as unpacking the cultural ideas, ideals, values, and beliefs to which
it is attached. Analyzing teacher education through a rhetorical
lens means taking account of the ways that metaphors, narratives,
and literary devices are used strategically to garner support for the
approaches various groups favor and also for their ways of under-
standing the issues in the rst place. Finally, my analysis of the new
teacher education depends on the idea that teacher education is
always, in part, political, an assumption that, in a certain sense,
subsumes the others. This is based on the premise that ambiguity,
conict, and competing goals are inherent in human societies.
Thus teaching and teacher education are inherently and unavoid-
ably political, in that they involve the negotiation of conicting
values about the purposes, roles, and content of schooling.
2
Urgent calls for something new and improved have been the
rule rather than the exception in teacher education almost since
Educational Researcher, Vol. 34, No. 7, pp. 317
3 OCTOBER 2005
Features
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its beginning. Even in this eld that has had continuous cycles
of critique and reform, however, there is something new emerg-
ing out of a convergence of current social, economic, profes-
sional, and political trends that is qualitatively different from
previous calls for improvement. The new teacher education
grows out of the changing notions of accountability that surfaced
in the mid-1960s (Cuban, 2004) and, more specically, the ed-
ucational reform movements that began in the 1980s (Sirotnik,
2004). In addition, the new teacher education is inuenced by
the continuing educational achievement gap, the enlarged role of
the federal government in education, the elevation of the science
of education, the embrace of a market approach to education
policy, and the history and status of the profession.
In this article, I offer my read of the current state of the eld,
including identication of what is being called for, by whom,
and for what purposes. This includes identication of emerging
trends, aspects of teacher education newly required by law, and
standards that are now consistent across the profession. This also
includes analysis of the underlying premises that are being
stitched into the logic of teacher education so seamlessly that
they are already nearly imperceptible, as well as areas where there
is considerable disagreement. It is important to note that I am
not characterizing the new teacher education as something being
done to the profession by outside forces. Rather, the teacher
education profession is being shaped by, but also helping to
shape, the new teacher education.
Of course, the emergence of a new teacher education has been
gradual and evolutionary rather than abrupt, and some of the
changes have deep historical and epistemological roots. But for
heuristic purposes I use, as a rough marker for the emergence of
the new teacher education, the reauthorization of the Higher Ed-
ucation Act (HEA) in 1998, whose Title II provisions stipulated
numerous mandatory reporting and accountability requirements
for teacher education, linked state grants to the revision of certi-
cation, and provided funding for alternate routes (Earley, 2004).
Finally, it is important to note that my analysis does not assume
that teacher education is monolithic and unitary. It is clear that
not all teacher education programs and pathways are the same,
and there are multiple agendas for teacher education reform. It
may be useful to think of teacher education as consisting of plural
universes wherein multiple and sometimes even contradictory re-
forms proceed simultaneously while other aspects of teacher ed-
ucation remain unchanged. What this means is that the new
teacher education I describe in this article does not necessarily
characterize any one teacher preparation program, route, or pol-
icy, and it certainly does not characterize all of them. Rather my
analysis focuses on emerging trends, patterns, and directions in
the eld.
To develop this analysis of the new teacher education, I re-
viewed more than 60 teacher education reform documents that
were widely disseminated from just before the HEA reauthoriza-
tion in 1998 through the early months of 2005, including cri-
tiques, resolutions, commissioned reports, debates, calls for action,
policy recommendations, editorials, yearbooks, reviews of the lit-
erature, and descriptions of major new initiatives and studies. For
comparison, I also reviewed the dozen-or-so teacher education
specic documents that were widely disseminated in the imme-
diately preceding reform period, which began in 1983 with the
publication of A Nation at Risk (National Commission on Excel-
lence in Education, 1983) and continued through the mid-1990s.
My major argument in this article is that from the late 1990s
to the present, a new teacher education has been called for and,
to a great extent, has actually emerged. This new teacher educa-
tion has three closely coupled pieces: It is constructed as a pub-
lic policy problem, based on research and evidence, and driven
by outcomes. (See Figure 1.) Falling out of this new model are
several pairs of issues which, although long debated, are increas-
ingly being positioned as forced choices for teacher preparation
a highly problematic trend. These include the conict between
diversication and selectivity of the teacher workforce, the val-
orization of subject matter at the expense of pedagogy, the com-
petition between university and multiple other locations as the
site for teacher preparation, and the contradictions of simulta-
neous regulation and deregulation. In light of space limitations,
this article concentrates primarily on the three major pieces of
the new teacher education, only mentioning the related tensions,
although these are certainly worth thorough consideration.
Teacher Education as a Policy Problem
The rst, and perhaps most important, piece of the new teacher
education is that it is being constructed as a public policy prob-
lem. I refer to teacher education as a problem here not in the
pejorative sense, but in the sense that all developing and devel-
oped countries must deal with certain challenges or problems,
such as providing teachers for the nations schoolchildren. As
Deborah Stone (1997) suggests, however, there are no universal,
scientic, or objective methods of problem denition (p. 134) in
a political society, and goals are competing and protean rather
than xed. During the 1960s and 70s and the early 80s, the
problem of teacher education in the United States was dened
primarily as a training problem (Cochran-Smith & Fries, 2005).
By the 1980s, however, teacher education came to be dened as
a learning problemunderstanding how prospective teachers
learned the knowledge, skills, and dispositions needed to func-
tion as school professionals.
When teacher education is dened as a policy problem (see
Figure 2), the goal is to determine which of its broad parameters
that can be controlled by policymakers is most likely to enhance
teacher quality and thus have a positive impact on desired school
outcomes. The policy parameters in question are the broad struc-
tural arrangements and regulations of teacher education, such as
teacher testing, subject matter, and eldwork requirements, 4- or
5-year programs, and alternate entry routes. The desired school
outcomes are pupils learning but may include other outcomes
as well. As Figure 2 shows, research and evidence about which as-
pects of teacher preparation do and do not have a positive impact
on pupil outcomes are presumed to be what should guide the for-
mulation of policy.
Although policymakers attention to the problem of teacher
preparation is not new, three things are: faith in state and federal
policy as the key to solving the problem of teacher education; the
desire (at least rhetorical) to establish policy based on sound re-
search; and the inclusion of policy as a major part of the discourse
within the teacher education community itself. This policy ap-
proach was not the norm during most of the long history of teacher
education. In fact, Carolyn Evertson and colleagues (Evertson,
EDUCATIONAL RESEARCHER 4
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Hawley, & Zlotnik, 1985) pointed out two decades ago that
most proposals for teacher education reform were unburdened
by evidence that the suggested changes [would] make a differ-
ence in quality of teachers (p. 2). Further, as Mary Kennedy
(1996) noted, policy-related approaches to teacher education
were traditionally most familiar to skeptics and critics of teacher
education, including economists and policy analysts, and least
familiar to teacher educators themselves. Both situations have
changed considerably over the last half dozen years, and many re-
cent debates about and within teacher education have concen-
trated on policy and the policy-relevant evidence.
Teacher Education as a Policy Problem:
Examples and Essence
The policy turn in teacher education is reflected in the many
new reports about teacher quality and preparation that are orga-
nized around the interests of policymakers and intended to inu-
ence the policy debate. For example, no fewer than 15 research
5 OCTOBER 2005
FIGURE 1. The new teacher educationwhats emerging.
FIGURE 2. Teacher education as a policy problem.
Research-
and
Evidence-
Based
Outcomes-
Driven
Regulation/
Deregulation
Multiple
Sites/
University
The New
Teacher
Education
Diversification/
Selectivity
Subject
Matter/
Pedagogy
Teacher
Education
as a Policy
Problem
Teacher
Quality
Teacher
Education
Policy
School
Outcomes
Research,
Evidence
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reviews (including their respective responses and addenda) that
start with policymakers questions have been produced in the
short period between 2000 and 2005.
3
To illustrate the gist of teacher education as a policy problem,
I use two examples from the remarkable amount of material now
being produced with policymakers in mind. A recent report on
teacher quality by the Education Commission of the States
(Allen, 2003), for example, synthesized the results of 92 empiri-
cal studies to address eight policy questions. On the basis of the
strength of the research, the report rated the degree of condence
that policymakers should place in its answers to these questions,
with highest marks given to studies that shed light on causal re-
lationships. The answer to the question posed in the reports
titleEight Questions on Teacher Preparation: What Does the Re-
search Say?can be summarized in two words: Very little. In
fact, the report concluded that none of its answers had strong
empirical support and only one had even moderate support,
making reliable policy recommendations difficult.
A more colorful exampleand one that is considerably less
tentative in its conclusionsis Increasing the Odds (Walsh &
Hale, 2004), a report for policymakers produced by the National
Council on Teacher Quality, which features cartoon-like illus-
trations. The cover pictures a star teacher candidate plucked
from the clamoring crowd of would-be teachers and carried by
the seat of his pants by the crane of policy into the school. This
kind of illustration makes the reports intentions clear, as does its
subtitle, How Good Policies Can Yield Better Teachers. The brief
report provides terse bottom lines about what the research says
and what policymakers ought to do.
There are signicant variations in the depth, breadth, and
complexity of studies and syntheses that dene teacher education
as a policy problem. Some dene teacher quality in terms of both
pupil performance and teacher attributes. Some include out-
comes such as teacher placement and retention in hard-to-staff
schools, in addition to pupil achievement. Some pay attention to
the cultures of schools and the conditions that do or do not sup-
port the faithful implementation of policy. These variations
notwithstanding, however, the central thesis or theory of reform
behind the construction of teacher education as a policy problem
is consistent: The implementation of appropriate policies re-
garding teacher education will solve the teacher supply problem
and enhance the quality of the teachers being prepared for the
nations schools, thus leading to desired school outcomes, espe-
cially pupils learning.
For Better and for Worse
So, is the policy approach for better or for worse? It is certainly
for the better that the general public and policymakers have con-
cluded what parents and those who work as or with teachers have
long knownteachers matter. Their work makes a difference in
childrens lives, and we should pay more attention to policies and
practices assuring that all children have good teachers. And it is
certainly for the better that research is being used to guide pol-
icy. For years, AERA members, including a number of presidents
in their annual addresses, have tried to bridge the divides be-
tween research and policy and between research and practice. Ef-
forts to link research and policy are not simply welcome; they are
the essence of our work in this organization. Further, it is both
in keeping with the general shift in notions of educational ac-
countability from inputs to outcomes and an essential part of le-
gitimacy for a profession that it be held accountable for its work.
After all, who among us would stand against the idea that what
happens in teacher education programs should have a demon-
strable impact on what teachers actually do in classrooms and on
what and how much students learn?
With these things said, however, it appears that an exceedingly
narrow version of teacher education as a policy problem is being
promoted by some public officials and the foundations and think
tanks allied with them. This approach is reected in the Secretary
of Educations three reports to Congress (U.S. Department of
Education, 2002, 2003, 2004) on meeting the highly qualied
teachers challenge and in other position statements. The Secre-
tarys rst report (U.S. Department of Education, 2002) asserted
that teacher education was broken, in that it was not produc-
ing the teachers needed by the nation. According to that report,
research showed both that teachers education courses did not
improve pupils achievement and that teachers verbal ability and
subject matter knowledge were the most important attributes of
highly qualied teachers. The report said that existing alternate
routes demonstrated that they could increase teacher supply
while maintainingand even boostingteacher quality. With
these facts in mind, the report asked, what would a rational
teacher preparation and recruitment model look like? And the
report answered: In sum, a model for tomorrow would be based
on the best alternate route programs of today (p. 19).
Putting aside that the Secretarys conclusions about what the re-
search shows are highly debated (Darling-Hammond & Youngs,
2002; Zeichner & Conklin, 2005), two aspects of the policy ap-
proach to teacher education are worth noting: its linear view of the
impact of policy coupled with a circular view of teacher quality,
and its grounding in a market-based approach to reform.
Teacher Quality as Circular
The Secretarys reports and other related position statements take
a linear view of how policy affects educational outcomes, with-
out much attention to school culture, resources, and communi-
ties or to variations in district and state accountability contexts
(Elmore, 2002). In the narrow policy view of teacher education,
a key link is teacher quality, which is now one of the most com-
mon phrases in the vocabulary of educational reform, and one of
the few about which we have national consensus. In short, every-
body likes teacher quality and wants more of it. The problem is
there is no consensus about what it is. The notion implicit in the
narrow policy approach that I am critiquing here, however, is
surprisingly straightforward.
As Eric Hanushek (2002) suggests, I use a simple denition
of teacher quality: good teachers are ones who get large gains in
student achievement for their classes; bad teachers are just the
opposite (p. 3). Hanusheks analyses are sophisticated and based
on complex econometrics. His denition of teacher quality,
however, is simple and circular: Teacher quality is test score
gains, and, conversely, test score gains are evidence of teacher
quality (see Figure 3). In denitions like this one, it is clear that
teacher quality is assumed to reect an amorphous some-
thing, but that something is captured only in test scores. At the
end of the day, then, teacher quality remains a black boxwe do
EDUCATIONAL RESEARCHER 6
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not know what effective teachers do, know, believe, or build on,
nor do we know the conditions that make this possible. Further,
because teacher quality is isomorphic with pupil achievement
achievement, too, is a black box, and we know nothing about
what and how high-performing pupils learn, what resources they
bring to school with them, or how they build on what they
know. Knowing that there are variations among teachers and
students without any information about why, how, for whom,
under what conditions, and to what ends may allow us to group
teachers into segments from highest- to lowest-performing, but it
does not go very far toward improving teacher preparation or
schooling.
A Market-Based Model
The other for worse aspect of constructing teacher education
as a narrow policy problem is its basis in a market model of soci-
ety. In Policy Paradox, Deborah Stone (1997) characterizes the
market model as a social system in which individuals compete
with one another for scare resources and pursue their self inter-
ests through the exchange of mutually benecial items. Here, the
ultimate freedom is the freedom of the market, and the public
interest is assumed to be the net result of all individuals pursu-
ing their self interest (p. 22). Problems requiring collective so-
cial action or private sacrice for the greater good are seen as
exceptions, and change is assumed to occur through informed
self-interest, prompted by competition and the prospect of re-
wards and punishments. Stone contrasts this model of society
with that of a political community, wherein individuals live in
a web of dependencies, loyalties, and associations, and where
they envision and ght for a public interest as well as their indi-
vidual interests (p. x). Her distinction is useful here.
Teaching at Risk, the 2004 report of The Teaching Commis-
sion, chaired by former IBM CEO Louis Gerstner, provides an
illustration. The problem of teaching quality, like most of the so-
lutions recommended by the Commission, is couched in the
logic and language of the marketplace. For example, the report
refers to a poorly educated public in terms of costs in individual
productivity and national economic growth, holding out the
promise that substantial improvements in education over a pe-
riod of 20 yearsincluding revamping the nations teaching
forcecould lead to as much as a 4% addition to the Gross Do-
mestic Product (p. 14).
One of the clearest statements of the market ideology applied
directly to teacher preparation is in a 2001 proposal from the
Progressive Policy Institute (Hess, 2001). This proposal calls for
tearing down the wall of teacher preparation and certication
and exposing schools of education to the cleansing waters of
competition (p. 22). The proposal asserts that the current
model of teacher certication, which prescribes preparation for
new teachers, is monopolistic and removes key incentives for
quality . . . [while] the competitive model treats teachers as au-
tonomous professionals able to make their own informed deci-
sions about skills and expertise development (p. 2).
The consequences of market cleansing are very clear in this
proposal. In fact, the proposal specically points out that if the
competitive system were put in place, little would change in the
suburbs, where schools would continue to hire fully qualied and
certied teachers. But in what are referred to as dysfunctional
school districts, the competitive model would be welcome, ac-
cording to this proposal:
Under this proposed system, little is likely to change in many of
our high-performing suburban districts. In the Fairfax (Virginia)
and West Chester (New York) counties of the U.S., the school sys-
tems are ooded with teacher applicants and . . . school adminis-
trators would continue to cherry pick from the nations top teacher
education graduates. It is the less desirable and more troubled sys-
tems, the nations urban and rural school districts where adminis-
trators currently have tremendous difficulty nding . . . certied
bodies . . . where the wave of new teachers will most likely be re-
cruited and welcomed. (Hess, 2001, p. 23)
That affluent school districts would continue to have a wide
range of fully prepared teachers to choose from while poor and
urban schools would be grateful for what they could get is not
seen as a problem from a market perspective. In fact, this is what
7 OCTOBER 2005
FIGURE 3. The black box of teacher quality as test scores.
Teacher
Education
Policy
Research,
Evidence
Teacher
Quality
Pupil
Test
Scores
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EDUCATIONAL RESEARCHER 8
it means to let the market decide who gets which teachers. The
Progressive Policy Institute proposal is consistent with others
that are market-based, such as the Thomas B. Fordham Foun-
dations Manifesto (1999) on how to get better teachers by ap-
plying the discipline of the market. As the Progressive Policy
Institute proposal itself so clearly indicates, this approach will
reify and perhaps intensify the inequities that already plague our
schools since the affluent and middle classes will always be in the
best position to make choices, including choices about what
teachers to hire. Surely, then, as an education research commu-
nity, we must recognize that a solely market-based approach to
teacher education is for the worse.
Teacher Education Based on Research and Evidence
The second major piece of the new teacher education is its basis
in evidence and research. If, as Ellen Lagemann (2000) suggests,
education had a romance with quantication (p. xi) during the
20th century, its current paramour is evidence, and the affair is
hot and heavy in teacher education.
The preoccupation of the new teacher education with evi-
dence is consistent with the way the standards movement has
evolved and with the trend toward evidence-based practice in ed-
ucation writ large. Although there have long been several lines of
research related to the effects of teacher education (Kennedy,
1999), the current intense focus on evidence in the mainstream
of teacher education is a signicant departure from the reforms
of the distant and recent past. The major reforms of the 1980s
and early 1990s, for example, pushed teacher education to be
more coherent and intellectually rigorous, and accreditation
standards required teacher educators to concentrate on the pro-
fessional knowledge base. At the same time, some reformers ar-
gued that school renewal and teacher education reform should
proceed simultaneously based on moral purposes. None of these
reforms concentrated on evidence.
Evidence-Based Teacher Education: Examples and Essence
The most obvious example of the focus on evidence in the new
teacher education is the Title II reporting requirements that went
into effect in 1998 following the reauthorization of HEA. These
require all states to provide annual evidence to the federal gov-
ernment about the quality of teacher preparation, which in turn
depends on institutions providing annual evidence to the state
about the qualications (especially scores on state teacher tests)
of every candidate recommended for certication.
In addition, the National Council for the Accreditation of
Teacher Education (NCATE) now requires institutions to pro-
vide compelling evidence (Williams et al., 2003, p. xiii) of
teachers content knowledge and performance, and demands
that all programs have built-in data-driven assessment systems.
The Teacher Education Accreditation Council (TEAC), ap-
proved as a national accrediting agency in 2003, requires valid
and reliable evidence that would be credible to disinterested ex-
perts in support of the claims a faculty makes about its teacher
graduates (Murray, 2005). The rst of three design principles of
Teachers for a New Era (TNE), a major teacher education ini-
tiative funded primarily by the Carnegie Corporation, is respect
for evidence.
Across the country, more and more of the people engaged in
teacher education are also engaged in assembling evidence about
their practices and their graduates. This is partly to satisfy their
evaluators, but it is also to see whether programs are measuring up
to their own standards for excellent teaching. In addition, many
teacher educators nationally and internationally are engaged
in practitioner inquiry and self-study in connection with their
own programs, courses, and assumptions (Loughran, Hamilton,
LaBoskey, & Russell, 2004). What all of this evidence gathering
has in common is the intentional and systematic effort to unlock
the black box of teacher education, turn the lights on inside it,
and shine spotlights into its corners, rafters, and oorboards. The
central tenet of the evidence-based feature of the new teacher ed-
ucation is that with clear goals, more evidence, and more light,
practitioners and policymakers at all levels will make better deci-
sions, and teacher quality will improve.
For Better and for Worse
So, is this evidence-based approach for better or for worse? Yes
and yes.
Many aspects are denitely for the better. For years, the crit-
ics have said that teacher education is idiosyncratic and insulated,
guided more by tradition, fashion, or ideology than by cutting-
edge research and solid evidence. If this was ever trueand that
is arguableit certainly is changing. It is clear that there are nu-
merous careful studies now under way, many of which involve
teacher educators working with colleagues in economics, mea-
surement, sociology, psychology, and anthropology to invent
mixed methods for studying the meaning and impact of teacher
preparation variations. It is likely that these efforts will indeed
shine new light on some of the old problems.
On a more local level, many teacher education programsmy
own includednow know more than they ever did about
whether and where their candidates teach, how long they stay,
and how well prepared they are for the challenges of beginning
teaching. It is also clear that more and more teacher educators are
working from what Susan Lytle and I (Cochran-Smith & Lytle,
1999, 2004) refer to as an inquiry stance on practice, by treat-
ing their own work as sites for systematic and intentional inquiry
and their own and others research as generative of new possibil-
ities. I believe that these related but differing activities that aim
to make teacher education more evidence-based are denitely for
the better. They have the potential to transform the culture of
teacher preparation by shifting the focus of accountability from
external policy only to external policy plus local internal practice.
There are other aspects, however, of the evidence focus of the
new teacher education that are very troubling. These derive from
the narrow version of evidence-based practice and policy that is
part of the current education agenda, whose theory is explicit in
the recommendations by the Coalition for Evidence-Based Pol-
icy (2002):
Education is a eld in which a vast number of interventions . . .
have gone in or out of fashion over time with little regard to rig-
orous evidence. As a result, over the past 30 years the United States
has made almost no progress in raising the achievement of ele-
mentary and secondary school students . . . despite a 90 percent in-
crease in real public spending per pupil. . . . The Department
should undertake a focused and sustained effort to . . . (i) Build the
knowledge base of educational interventions that have been proven
effective through randomized controlled trials . . . (ii) Provide
strong incentives for the widespread use of such proven, replicable
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9 OCTOBER 2005
interventions by recipients of federal education funds. In this strat-
egy, we believe, lies the key to reversing decades of stagnation in
American elementary and secondary education, and bringing cu-
mulative, evidence-driven progressfor the rst timeto the
U.S. educational enterprise. (pp. 12)
Although this strategy is crafted primarily for K12 education,
its hand reaches far into teacher education, as a report for the
White House conference on preparing tomorrows teachers
made clear: Unfortunately experimental methods have not yet
found their way to research on teacher training (Whitehurst,
2002, p. 10).
Evidence-Based Practice
I want to be crystal clear on my position here. There is an im-
portant place for large-scale experiments and other causal and
correlational research in teacher education. But I question the
likelihood that randomized trials will provide all or most of what
we need to know to improve teacher preparation. The source of
the evidence-based education movement in the United States is
evidence-based medicine in the United Kingdom, which focuses
on randomized clinical trials. In a critical appraisal of evidence-
based practice in the United Kingdom, Liz Trinder (2000) points
out that in the early 1990s, evidence-based medicine was heralded
as profound enough to be referred to as a paradigm shift (p. 212).
However, over time and across many elds, a number of cracks
are beginning to show and its claim to be a new paradigm appears
to be premature or over-inated (p. 236). When applied to
teacher education, the narrow version of evidence-based practice
does not offer a new paradigm, either. In fact, many of the un-
derlying assumptions are quite similar to those of the training
model of teacher education and the processproduct research on
teaching that were predominant in the 1960s and 1970s. Al-
though the new notion of evidence-based teacher education is
not exactly the same as the training model, its underlying as-
sumptions about the nature of teaching, the purposes of teacher
preparation, and the power of science are very similar. To use
Patti Lathers (2004) words, evidence-based practice rein-
scrib[es] the idealized natural science model . . . [and] disavows
decades of critique (p. 27). At the end of the day, then, with the
very narrow version of evidence-based education, the new para-
digm may well be the old paradigm, or as Lather concludes a bit
more bluntly, This IS your fathers paradigm (p. 15).
In responding to the report of the National Research Council
(2001) on scientic research in education, which provides exam-
ples of educational questions that warrant research, Fred Erickson
(2005) also critiqued the narrow view of scientific research
currently being forwarded. Erickson suggests that questions of
prediction, explanation, and verification are inappropriately
overriding questions of description, interpretation, and discovery.
He argues that many of the most important questions in educa-
tion cannot be answered by causal research designs and offers a list
of other possible questions in education that are worth pursuing.
Inspired by Ericksons list, I would suggest that there are many
important questions about teacher education that deserve explo-
ration. Some of these can be answered by causal and correlational
studies, while others cannot. All, I think, are worth asking: Are
any variations in teacher preparation associated with teachers re-
tention in hard-to-staff and other schools? What experiences do
teacher candidates of color have in mostly White teacher educa-
tion programs and institutions? Is this important? Are there dif-
ferences in the ways college graduates with and without teacher
preparation construct lessons, interact with pupils, and interpret
what they see in classrooms? Are these differences related to
pupils learning? Is caring a quality that can be taught in a teacher
preparation program, learned on the job, or is it something peo-
ple simply have or dont have? Does this matter in teaching?
How do we know? How do teacher candidates make sense of the
roles parents do and do not play in their childrens school lives
what do they make of the no-shows at back-to-school night
and parent conferences? Does this make a difference in how
teachers act in the classroom? Why do new teachers migrate from
urban to suburban schools, even if they were prepared specically
for urban classrooms? Is it fair that suburban school districts have
a wide range of choices about which teachers to hire, while urban
and rural schools do not? How do we make a judgment about
fairness in this case? What are the school conditions that make it
possible for new teachers to take advantage of the resources avail-
able to them? How do teacher candidates know if their pupils are
learning? What do they count as evidence of learning, and how
do they use that evidence to alter curriculum and instruction?
The Politics of Evidence
As my questions (and Ericksons) suggest, there are many im-
portant issues related to the preparation of teachers, some of
which may be answered by randomized clinical trials; but many
othersjust as importantrequire empirical evidence that de-
scribes, interprets, and discovers. There are also many questions
on my list and elsewhere that cannot be answered by empirical
evidence at all. These remind us that although assembling good
evidence can have a profound effect, it cannot tell us what to do
in teacher education. Even on that grand day when all the evi-
dence is in, we will still need to make decisions based in part on
values, moral principles, priorities, available resources, trade-offs,
and commitments.
What this suggests is that there is a politics to the new teacher
education that is not being taken into account in the narrow ver-
sion of evidence-based practice. This does not mean that we
should not gather good evidence. It can have a tremendous im-
pact on the shape of teacher education for the 21st century. But
it does mean that we should acknowledge the politics of evi-
dence. As we gather more and more evidence in teacher educa-
tion (and in education more broadly), we must not forget to ask:
Evidence of what? For what purpose? Collected by whom and
under what circumstances? In order to serve whose interest and
(perhaps) ignoring or disadvantaging whom?
Teacher Education Driven by Outcomes
The new teacher education is frontally about outcomes, and it is
now widely assumed that the sine qua non of good teacher-
preparation policies and practices is that they ensure that teachers
can ensure pupils achievement. In fact, the language of outcomes
has become so much a part of the contemporary teacher educa-
tion lexicon as to be completely normalized. Across the country,
providers of teacher education are struggling to demonstrate,
document, and measure the effects, results, consequences, and
effects of teacher preparation on school and other outcomes.
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Prior to the mid-1990s, however, the emphasis was primarily on
processhow prospective teachers learned to teach, how their
beliefs and attitudes changed over time, what kinds of pedagogical
and other knowledge they needed, and what contexts supported
their learning. During this time, teacher education assessment
focused on what is now retrospectively referred to as inputs
rather than outcomesinstitutional commitment, qualications
of faculty, courses and eldwork, and the alignment of all of
these with professional knowledge and standards. The shift in
teacher education from inputs to outcomes is part of a larger sea
change in how we think about educational accountability.
Teacher Education Driven by Outcomes:
Essence and Examples
An early indication of the emerging outcomes focus was the
highly publicized debate during the late 1990s and early 2000s
about whether collegiate teacher education and professional cer-
tication were warranted as broad educational policies. Played
out in the pages of academic journals, face-to-face debates, and
reports and counter-reports from foundations and professional
organizations, the debate zeroed in on outcomes, primarily pupils
achievement.
In addition, there are many state and regional efforts now
under way that involve the collective efforts of teacher educators
and other researchers to trace the impact of teacher preparation
variations on outcomes of various kinds. Researchers in western
Oregon, for example, are building on years of research on teacher
work samples (Schalock & Myton, 1988) to examine the longi-
tudinal impact of variations in teacher preparation on pupils
learning; work samples have since been used as a way to assess the
outcomes of teacher education in many state and reform initia-
tives. Ohios Teacher Quality Project, which involves all 50 of its
teacher certication institutions, is using both value-added as-
sessments and qualitative studies to sort out the relationships of
teacher preparation, classroom discourse, instructional practices,
and pupils learning. Working with labor market economists and
teacher educators, the City University of New York is using New
York City and New York State teacher databases to analyze out-
comes by pathways, including traditional and a variety of alter-
nate route programs located at New York public and private
colleges. In addition, under larger umbrellas such as NCATE,
TEAC, and TNE, many individual institutions are studying the
outcomes of teacher preparation, dened as both teacher candi-
dates and pupils learning. The University of Virginia, for ex-
ample, is using video cases to assess teacher candidates decisions
about classroom events and their classroom practices; there, the
consistency of candidates practices with research-based strategies
is considered an outcome of the program. Bank Street College is
using structured observations to analyze the tasks their teachers
assign to pupils in terms of cognitive demands; in this case, in-
creasing cognitive complexity is regarded as an outcome.
One of the clearest examples of the new outcomes-driven
teacher education is the state of Louisianas Teacher Quality Ini-
tiative, which is intended to improve teacher preparation through
four stages, including requiring that all programs meet high
accreditation standards. The fourth stage, which is currently
at the pilot test point, was announced in a press release from
the Louisiana Board of Regents (August 25, 2004) as follows:
Louisiana is the rst state in the nation to examine the effec-
tiveness of teacher preparation programs by assessing the achieve-
ment growth of students and linking that growth in student
learning to college and university teacher preparation programs.
What is groundbreaking about this is that it is a state-level ini-
tiative to use value-added assessment to compare the achieve-
ment gains of the pupils of experienced teachers with the gains
of the pupils of new teachers who were prepared at various
Louisiana teacher education programs, thus allowing the evalu-
ation and ranking of the programs and their institutions based
on pupil outcomes. Preliminary analyses indicate that the pupils
of experienced teachers evidence more growth than the pupils of
new teachers, with the exception of the pupils of new teachers
from one teacher education program: Those pupils growth ac-
tually surpassed that of the pupils of experienced teachers. Ac-
cording to the researchers (Noell, August 24, 2004), these results
suggest that a new teacher does not have to be less effective than
an experienced one and point to future possibilities for im-
proving the other programs in the state, on the basis of what the
exceptional program does.
As these examples show, there are important philosophical
and methodological variations in the new focus on outcomes, in-
cluding especially whether pupils achievement as measured by
test scores is the only outcome examined, or whether other out-
comessuch as teacher candidates knowledge growthcount
as well. There are also differences in what are suggested as the log-
ical or possible implications of focusing on outcomes. These dif-
ferences notwithstanding, however, the central tenet is that the
effectiveness of teacher preparation programs and pathways can
and ought to be assessed in terms of their affects on outcomes,
especially pupils achievement, and that this information will
lead to improved teacher preparation.
For Better and for Worse
Is the emphasis on outcomes for better or for worse? My answer
here is the same as it has been so farthe new outcomes-driven
teacher education is both for the better and for the worse.
It is certainly for the better that schools of educationand
some alternate providers of teacher preparationare thinking
hard about the goals of their programs and inventing new ways
to trace their impact all the way to the ultimate destination
the nations schoolchildren. This is virtually unheard-of in
professional education. For example, although providers of
medical and legal education keep track of their graduates
scores on exams, they generally do not follow their graduates
into hospitals and courtrooms. In fact, a recent study from the
Finance Project (Neville, Sherman, & Cohen, 2005) indicates
that, among the professions studied (law, accounting, archi-
tecture, nursing, firefighting, law enforcement, and educa-
tion), only education assesses the effects of its professional
training programs on professional performance. In this sense,
the work in teacher education is not only for the betterit
may be ground-breaking.
It is also for the better that there are many interdisciplinary
groups of researchers working together on the outcomes prob-
lem. They are inventing new ways to think about outcomes and
systematically examining the complex links among variations in
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teacher preparation programs and pathways, teacher candidates
learning, varying accountability contexts, and pupils learning.
Many of these interdisciplinary efforts involve mixed-method or
multiple-method research designs. They work from the idea that
pupils test scores on state assessments are a necessary part of eval-
uating the outcomes of teacher preparation, but they also make
clear that test scores alone are an insufficient way to do so.
In addition, at some teacher education institutions, particularly
those that prepare teachers for urban schools, educators are con-
ceptualizing work for equity and social justice as an outcome of
teacher preparation in and of itself. For example at the University
of California, Los Angeles, the teacher education group has
worked for the last 7 years to track the placement and retention
patterns of their graduates who work in Los Angeles most diffi-
cult schools, counting as an outcome of their program their grad-
uates commitment to and retention in careers as social justice
educators (Quartz & TEP Research Group, 2003). At Boston
College, we are developing a multi-methods instrument for as-
sessing how candidates learn to teach for social justice, by com-
bining surveys with vignette analysis, interviews, and school
observations of teachers and pupils. At the University of Illinois,
Chicago, educators are linking their program-completer infor-
mation to information from the Illinois Teacher Data Warehouse,
which tracks all Illinois public school teachers, to see whether they
meet their own goal of serving children who live in poverty. And
at Montclair State University, teacher educators have invented a
system for tracking the progress of every teacher candidate toward
the outcome of teaching for cultural diversity. What these exam-
ples have in common is the assumption that preparing teachers
who effectively teach all students (including those who attend the
poorest and most neglected schools) and, at the same time, work
to make their schools and communities more caring and just
places, is an essential outcome of teacher preparation.
All of these examplesfrom state and regional studies link-
ing pathways and pupils achievement to studies measuring out-
comes in terms of urban retention and work for social justice
are part of the new focus on the outcomes of teacher prepara-
tion. The full array of this work is beginning to establish what
has heretofore been a missing program of research in teacher
educationthat is, research that connects what happens in
teacher preparation to its consequences in classrooms and in the
world. This is surely for the better.
The Outcomes Trap
With this said, however, the reductionist version of outcomes
that is, relying entirely or almost entirely on pupils test scores as
the way to evaluate teacher preparationis highly problematic.
In an article titled The Testing Trap, Richard Elmore (2002)
argued that the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 and its sup-
porting bills and policies were accelerating the worst trend of
the current accountability movement: that performance-based
accountability has come to mean testing alone (p. 35). In
teacher education, we may be dangerously close to falling into
what may be called the outcomes trap, which in a nutshell is
the questionable theory that evaluating teacher preparation pro-
grams on the basis of graduates annual impact on pupils test
scores and reporting those evaluations publicly will bring about
change andultimatelysolve the teacher quality problem.
The outcomes trap has three springs. The rst spring is the
premise that teachers are the critical components in boosting
pupils achievement. The report of The Teaching Commission
(2004) is particularly straightforward on this point:
Bolstering teacher quality is, of course, not the only challenge we
face as we seek to strengthen public education. There are social
problems, nancial obstacles, and facilities issues, among other
concerns. But The Teaching Commission believes that quality
teachers are the critical factor in helping young people overcome
the damaging effects of poverty, lack of parental guidance, and
other challenges. . . . In other words, the effectiveness of any
broader education reform . . . is ultimately dependent on the qual-
ity of teachers in classrooms. (pp. 1415)
Reports such as this seem unconcerned about the paradox that
teachers are presumed to be both the most intractable problem
and the best solution to all that ails the schools (Cohen, 1995;
Fullan, 1993). They ignore the reality that teachers (and teacher
education programs) alone cannot x the nations worst schools
and improve the life chances of the most disadvantaged students.
To do so will take simultaneous investments in resources, capac-
ity building, and teachers professional growth, not to mention
changes in access to housing, health, and jobs. The trap here is that
statements like those in the previous two sentences get construed
by critics as an excuse for teachers or teacher education (e.g.,
Carter, 2000; Haycock, 2005). This is not an excuse. Acknowl-
edging that the problems of the nations schools include, but go
far beyond, teachers, and that the problems of the nation include,
but go far beyond, the schools, is not an excuse. It reects cate-
gorical acceptance of the goal of equal and high-quality education
for all students and at-out rejection of the idea that holding teach-
ers and teacher preparation accountable for everything will x
everything, while meanwhile letting everybody else off the hook.
The second spring in the outcomes trap has to do with teacher
preparation for urban and poor areas. A recent study by Decker,
Mayer, and Glazerman (2004) for the Mathematica Policy Re-
search Institute, which compared the effect on pupils of Teach
for America (TFA) teachers and nonTFA teachers, has been
heralded as a methodological breakthrough because it uses a ran-
domized eld trial and thus meets todays gold standard for re-
search. My critique here is not of the TFA program itself or of
the science used to study it, but of the question with which it
began: Do TFA teachers improve (or at least not harm) student
outcomes relative to what would have happened in their ab-
sence? (Decker et al., 2004, p. xi). As one critique pointed out,
the TFA study did not ask whether TFA or the control teachers
in the regions studied were effective for the students they taught:
If they had [asked this question], the answer would be, no.
Students of both TFA and control group teachers scored very
poorly (Southeast Center for Teaching Quality, 2004). Rather,
the study asked whether having teachers who were not fully pre-
pared and certied did any harm to pupils by making their
achievement scores any worse than they would have been any-
way, given the reality that high poverty schools often have to hire
poorly educated, uncertified, and unqualified teachers. Decker
et al. are explicit on this point: The consistent pattern of posi-
tive or zero impacts on test scores across grades, regions, and stu-
dent subgroups suggests that there is little risk that hiring TFA
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teachers will reduce achievement, either for the average student or
for most subgroups of students (p. xvi). The trap here is the
premise of studies like this one: that the goal of policies for high-
poverty, hard-to-staff, and minority schools is to provide teachers
who will do no harm because they are good enough to main-
tain or slightly increase existing very low levels of achievement
rather than to invest in approaches that interrupt the cycle of
inadequate resources, low expectations, and poor achievement.
The nal spring in the outcomes trap is the assumption that
the primary purpose of education in our society is to produce the
nations workforce in keeping with the demands of a competitive
and increasingly global and knowledge-based society. Norton
Grubb and Marvin Lazerson (2004) refer to an education system
whose purposes are dominated by preparation for economic
roles, as vocationalist, a trend that rst emerged at the turn of
the 20th century and is now paramount in the 21st. Vocational-
isms narrow focus on producing the nations workforce, coupled
with excessive attention to the tests used to compare U.S. stu-
dents with those in other countries, has pushed out other goals
and purposes of teacher education (Cuban, 2004; Michelli &
Keiser, 2004). Chief among those pushed out is the goal of prepar-
ing teachers who know how to prepare future citizens to partic-
ipate in a democratic society. Amy Gutman (1999) argues that
the key to what she calls deliberative democracy is democratic
education: Deliberative democracy underscores the importance
of publicly supported education that develops the capacity to
deliberate among all children as future free and equal citizens
(p. xii). If all free and equal citizens of a society are to have the
benet of a democratic education, all teachers need the knowl-
edge, skills, and dispositions to teach toward the democratic ideal,
and all teacher preparation programs need to be measuredat
least in partby their success at producing teachers who teach
for democracy. This is decidedly not what is happening as the
narrow and reductionist version of the new teacher education
gains prominence.
The New Teacher Education: Enduring Tensions
I have described in some detail the three major pieces of the emerg-
ing new teacher education: It is constructed as a policy problem,
based on research and evidence, and driven by outcomes. As these
pieces are put together in differing accountability contexts and in
light of the commitments that have historically animated teacher
education, a number of tensions have surfaced. These include the
trade-offs between selectivity and diversication of the teacher
workforce, the balance between subject matter and pedagogy, the
competition between the university and multiple other locations
as the site for teacher preparation, and the contradictions of si-
multaneous regulation and deregulation at both state and federal
levels. As noted above, space constraints permit me simply to
mention these four tensions.
Diversication and Selectivity
Increasingly, there are calls to increase the selectivity of teacher
preparation programs and entry routes based on claims that teach-
ers general verbal ability is consistently associated with pupils
achievement (Whitehurst, 2001). This trend is reected in the
teacher tests now in place in most states, the higher GPAs neces-
sary for entry into teacher education programs at many univer-
sities and colleges, and the record numbers of applicants to pro-
grams like Teach for America, which recruits seniors from highly
competitive liberal arts colleges and universities. At the same time,
however, as Villegas and Lucas (2004) and others have concluded,
there is a compelling case for increasing the racial and ethnic di-
versity of the teacher workforce, based on research about the cul-
tural knowledge of teachers of color, their function as role models
for all students, and the importance to pupil learning of the
teachers ability to establish caring relationships. There is also in-
creasing evidence that teacher testslike other tests historically
that are biased against minorities (Gitomer & Latham, 2000)
coupled with the negative experiences of many teachers of color
in preparation programs at mostly White institutions (Villegas
&Lucas), may be depressing minority participation in the teach-
ing profession. As these very different lines of inquiry suggest, the
tensions between diversication and selectivity come to the sur-
face very quickly with a new teacher education that is driven by
evidence and outcomes. There is more than one kind of evi-
dence, and there are often conicting, or at least not easily com-
patible, research conclusions. These conicts illustrate that many
important policy decisions ultimately are in part values- and
priority-oriented rather than simply evidence-based.
Subject Matter and Pedagogy
One of the signicant consequences of the new teacher educa-
tion is the bright spotlight on subject matter knowledge, which
now overshadows pedagogy and other areas related to education
study. Indeed, subject matter is the hallmark of highly qualied
teachers in the No Child Left Behind Act, which is echoed in
each of the Secretary of Educations Title II reports on teacher
quality. In these policy documents, the emphasis on subject mat-
ter is accompanied by rejection of, or at least questions about, the
need for pedagogical knowledge, particularly knowledge that
might be taught in education schools. Even inside the worlds of
university-based teacher preparation and state-level program ap-
proval, where pedagogy and classroom practice remain essential
indicators of teachers readiness to teach, there is growing faith
at least on the surfacethat general knowledge of the liberal arts
and sciences, coupled with more specic knowledge in the sub-
ject elds to be taught, is the magic bullet needed to improve
teacher preparation. This is evident in the requirements that
teacher candidates have arts and sciences majors in addition to,
or instead of, education majors; in the new core coursework re-
quirements in the liberal arts; in state teacher tests in content
areas; and in severe limits on how many education credits may
be taken as part of a degree at a public institution. These require-
ments privilege subject matter over pedagogy, reecting the pop-
ular myth that there is little to know about teaching and schools,
and what little there is can be easily picked up on the job. Al-
though the way this tension is playing out within the context of
high-stakes accountability is new, the tension between subject
matter knowledge and pedagogy has a very long history in teacher
education. In a certain sense, the current situation can be under-
stood as the latest iteration in a historical anti-educationism
(Lagemann, 2000), which encompasses assumptions concern-
ing the lack of knowledge, skill, ambition, and competence needed
and possessed by educators (p. xii).
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University and Multiple Sites
Although there were some alternate routes into teaching in the
1980s, for nearly all of the last century teacher preparation has
been located within higher education, rst in normal schools and
then in colleges and universities. Now, as part of the new teacher
education, almost all states have alternate providers, including
school-based teacher residency projects, computer-based distance
learning programs, and multiple alternate entry and certication
routes, some that are attached to universities and some that by-
pass them altogether. In addition, community colleges are in-
creasingly playing a role in teacher preparation, and for-prot
teacher preparation has emerged as part of a growing trend in
higher education wherein proprietary, degree-granting, and ac-
credited institutions offer occupational training for a widening
array of entry-level positions (Morey, 2001).
The merits of these multiple providers are often discussed
from a kind of horse race mentality, with empirical evidence
the supposed determiner of who wins by producing better test
results in pupils. Of course, this approach is problematic. Even
in the face of tightly specied policies, teacher education is en-
acted in ways that are highly localembedded in the multiple
and changing contexts of local institutions and regions and sub-
ject to the interpretations and social interactions of individuals
and groups. There is a tension between horse race research and
empirical investigations of what the active ingredients are in any
effective teacher preparation approach. It is also worth examin-
ing whether some outcomes of teacher preparation, much harder
to measure than test scores, are best accomplished at universities
such as teachers learning how the social, political, historical,
and cultural contexts of schooling have helped to create the cur-
rent system. Other aspects of preparation may well be accom-
plished only in the context of schools and classroomssuch as
learning how to design academic tasks and use classroom data
to make decisions about curriculum and instruction. Finally,
many goals of teacher preparation are best met in the intersec-
tions of universities, schools, and communities. It is not clear
whether there are any aspects of teacher preparation best ac-
complished through programmed learning modules at for-prot
training centers.
Regulation and Deregulation
I have noted that there are competing agendas for the reform of
teacher education. The deregulation agenda, consistent with
other market-based reforms, aims to eliminate most require-
ments for entry into the teaching profession and open up multi-
ple entry routes. In this sense, deregulationists want teacher
education and public schools to be more like charter and private
schools, in that they are accountable to the marketplace for hir-
ing and ring decisions, with the bottom line students scores on
tests. In many ways, this is the policy approach embraced by the
federal government (and a number of states). At the same time,
however, there are now unprecedented steps to regulate teacher
education through more stringent control of both the inputs and
the outcomes of teacher preparation. In a number of states, this
boils down to simultaneous efforts to deregulate and regulate
teacher preparationfor example, tighter control of required
courses at state-approved teacher preparation institutions, cou-
pled with the privileging of state-supported alternate routes that
are wide open in terms of candidates courses and experiential
backgrounds. There are similar contradictions at the federal level.
This seeming contradiction, tightly regulated deregulation
(Cochran-Smith, 2004a), reveals a major tension in the new
teacher education: on the one hand, support for alternate routes
that do away with most requirements and make entry into teach-
ing wide open, and on the other hand, centralized federal con-
trol that diminishes state- and local-level decisions and greatly
prescribes professional discretion and autonomy.
As this brief discussion suggests, the new teacher education is
complex, especially when understood in terms of the larger edu-
cational, economic, social, and political conditions in which it is
emerging: market-based reforms in education and a whole range
of other human services, increasing global competition, evidence-
based practice in medicine and many other professions, high-
stakes accountability, and persistent social and educational
inequities. The new teacher education has the potential to be for
the better, but it also has the potential to be for the worse. In de-
termining which, the education research community plays a crit-
ical role.
The Role of the Education Research Community
We need a new teacher education. The denitive question,
though, is how to get the best out of the new teacher education
when we can so easily imagine the worst.
The New Teacher Education: The Future?
What follows is one possible future scenario for the new teacher
education that reects some of its worst aspects.
We now have a huge national database that tracks the impact
of every teacher education program according to pupils annual
test scores. The national system produces numerical rankings of
the teachers in each school and school district as well as rank-
ings of all of the teacher preparation providers in each state and
across the nation. There are incentives for the winners, rang-
ing from cash bonuses to federal funds, to public justication
for charging higher rates for services. There are also severe sanc-
tions for the losers, including public exposure and withdrawal
of funds.
The result is that many teacher education programs have
shut down, but just as many others have sprung up. The com-
peting providers, especially the for-prots and programmed
learning centers, concentrate almost entirely on test prepara-
tion skills, with the most effective of them now lucrative na-
tional franchises. Among the losers are urban teacher
preparation programs and poor and minority schools because
their increasingly diverse populations and large numbers of
English language learners make the odds against their having
winners prohibitive, and thus they are harder to staff than ever.
Of course, affluent school districts still hire teachers who were
prepared in teacher ed programs at top colleges and universi-
ties, because their pupils already do well on tests and these dis-
tricts know the value of teachers who are broadly educated but
also know how to teach and know how people learn. In this
new world, only the radical fringe pays much attention to the-
ory, democratic ideals, or social justice because these dont
translate very well into test scores, and the public interest is un-
derstood to be the sum of each individuals private interest.
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Of course this is exaggerated. But to a great extent, I worry that
this is the direction we are heading. As Larry Cuban (1992) did
in his 1991 presidential address, I want to ask, What is our re-
sponsibility as scholars to speak out against policies we believe to
be seriously awed in both logic and evidence, and ultimately,
hostile to [our] vision for students? (p. 6). Cuban characterized
the momentum building in the late 1980s for national tests and
curriculum as a train rushing down a track. He asked whether
scholars should accommodate to what appeared by then almost
to be political realityby helping to build better track for the
train, in the form of, say, better testsor, whether they should
use their expertise, evidence, and freedom (p. 6) to try publicly
to slow down the train by speaking out to lay and professional
audiences in order to inuence the policy debate. Cuban sug-
gested that either choice (building better track or slowing down
the train) was reasonable for a scholar, although he himself pre-
ferred slowing the train.
The train Cuban described has not slowed down and is now
streaking through a deep dark tunnel, which instead of light at
its end, may have a concrete wall. I believe that as a community
of scholars, we have little choice but to join others in a both-
and strategy. That is, we need both to slow down the train, by
speaking out against the narrowest version of the new teacher
education, and, at the same time, to join others who are build-
ing better trackand, hopefully, bridges, new tunnel openings,
track switchers, and even exit ramps. This strategy of simultane-
ously working against and within the emerging new system is
paramount.
When I say we, here, I mean the people engaged in the day-
to-day work of preparing teachers, as well as those who do re-
search in, on, and for teacher education and those who analyze
EDUCATIONAL RESEARCHER 14
and formulate policy. But I also mean the community of educa-
tion scholars in a larger senseall of us who are readers, pro-
ducers, and consumers of research that is related to teaching and
teacher education and who care about public education, schools,
teachers, and children. Although this article focuses on teacher
education, it is clear that the issues it addresses are much broader.
The major pieces of the new teacher educationteacher ed-
ucation as a policy problem, based on research and evidence, and
driven by outcomesare problematic, particularly in their nar-
rowest form. In this concluding section, I wish to argue that, in-
stead, we need a new teacher education with three somewhat
different pieces: teacher education constructed as a policy prob-
lem and a political problem, teacher education based on evidence
plus, and teacher education driven by learning (see Figure 4).
Teacher Education as a Policy Problem
and a Political Problem
I have argued that the narrow super-rational view of teacher
education as a policy problem assumes a linear relationship from
policy to higher test scores. We need to challenge this idea and,
instead, construct teacher education as both a policy problem
and a political problem. The education research community
needs to make it clearer to the public and to policymakers that
there are signicant complexities in what happens to policies on
their way, as Susan Fuhrman (2001) puts it, from capitols to
classrooms. These complexities depend on the cultures and con-
texts of schools, the resources available, and the neighborhoods,
communities, and larger environments where schools are lo-
cated. They also have to do with variations in school district and
state accountability contexts. To get the best out of the new
teacher education, we need to give up the rationality project
FIGURE 4. The new teacher educationwhats possible.
Evidence
Plus
Learning-
Driven
Regulation/
Deregulation
Multiple
Sites/
University
The New
Teacher
Education
Diversification/
Selectivity
Subject
Matter/
Pedagogy
Teacher
Education
as a Political
Problem
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or the attempt to remove public policy from the irrationalities
and indignities (Stone, 1997, p. 6) of politics. Instead, we need
to embrace the political aspects of education policy as the in-
evitable stuff of social institutions in human societies. This will
mean understanding policy not as purely rational choice based
on expediency but as the struggle over ideas, ideals, competing
goals, values, and notions about what constitutes public and pri-
vate interest.
Teacher Education Based on Evidence Plus
I have also been arguing that, although evidence-based teacher ed-
ucation has many aspects for the better, the for worse version is
grounded in a narrow view of scientic research as causal stud-
ies only. To get the most out of the new teacher education, we
need a broader notion of science that includes but is not limited
to the investigation of causal questions, and a broader notion of
evidence that includes but is not limited to clinical trials. The new
teacher education needs also to be informed by inquiry and schol-
arship that are not empirical. Margaret Eisenhart (2005) recently
coined the phrase science plus to refer to science that incorpo-
rates experimental research and qualitative research in combina-
tion with historical, theoretical, critical, and ethical scholarship.
Following Eisenhart, I use the term evidence plus to make the
point that the new teacher education will be for the worse unless
it is informed by a wealth of critical and theoretical inquiry. In
particular, there are whole bodies of work about teacher learning
in communities and the preparation of teachers for a diverse so-
ciety that come from critical and multicultural perspectives in-
tended to interrupt the norms of conventional teacher education.
Teacher Education as Learning-Driven
Finally, this article suggests that paying attention to outcomes can
be for the better in teacher education. But the for-worse version
denes outcomes as test scores alone. My argument here is that
we need to make learningnot outcomes narrowly dened as
teststhe bottom line of teaching and teacher education When
teacher education is learning-driven, there is a focus on ensuring
that all schoolchildrenincluding those in poor schoolshave
rich opportunities to learn, not just opportunities to be held ac-
countable to the same high stakes. The bottom line for all chil-
dren needs to be learning basic skills, as well as deep knowledge
and critical thinking skills. We want students to be well prepared
for college and meaningful work. But we also need to regard eq-
uity and inclusion as outcomes of teacher education, in addition
to students social and emotional development. When learning
is the outcome, the goal of teacher education is to prepare teach-
ers who believe in and know how to provide challenging learning
opportunities for all students. That way everybody is prepared to
participate in a democratic society.
The New Teacher Education: Back to the Future
In conclusion, let us go back to the future for a quick look at a
new teacher education for the bestteacher education that is
constructed as a policy and a political problem, informed by ev-
idence plus, and driven by the bottom line of learning. Here is
another scenario for the future.
We now have many routes and pathways into teaching, but all
of them have the core components necessary for teachers to learn
to teach in the service of students learning. These components
were identied through dialogue within the profession and in
the public arena. Quantitative and qualitative evidence was
considered alongside arguments about teaching as an ethical
and moral activity. There were debates about ideas and ideals
for our society. Many people came to agree that, particularly in
light of changing demographics, education that promotes basic
skills and critical thinking for everybody was necessary to pre-
serve our democracy.
Teacher education scholars and practitioners in all routes
and pathways now collect evidence about their work. But be-
cause the focus is on learning opportunities as well as learning
outcomes, policymakers pay attention to resources as well as test
scores and performance measures. Social justice and equity are
common words in the discourse because they are seen as worthy
outcomes in and of themselves and as the foundation of a suc-
cessful education system.
Nearly all of the alternate entry paths are now closely con-
nected to universities, schools, and communities. It turned out
there actually were some important goals of teacher prepara-
tion that universities did particularly wellsuch as helping
teachers understand the social and historical patterns that cre-
ated the existing system (thus helping them understand how to
produce change); teaching about the relationships between cul-
ture and schooling; getting teacher candidates to examine
deeply held beliefs and expectations about children; and famil-
iarizing teacher candidates with the latest scholarship about
learning, pedagogy, and language. It also turned out that there
were major goals of teacher education that could only be met
in schools, such as learning to design instructional tasks; using
classroom data to make decisions; and creating and managing
classroom environments that bolster learning. It was also real-
ized that many goals were best met in the intersections of uni-
versities, schools, and communities. Over time, it became clear
that very few of the really important goals of teacher education
were accomplished through programmed learning at for-prot
training centers. These eventually faded away.
Every year, a popular national news magazine ranks the top
100 teacher preparation providers in terms of how well their
teachers do at creating rich learning opportunities for all chil-
dren and teaching toward the democratic ideal. Since these cri-
teria determine the rankings, everybody works really hard
toward these goals.
Some people will think that the second scenario is much more
ctional than the rst. But it does not have to be that way. In our
roles as scholars, I believe we must also be public intellectuals,
using our expertise, our evidence, and our freedom to challenge
a system that does not serve the interests of many students and
to lead the way in another direction for the best.
NOTES
This article was originally presented as the AERA Presidential Address
at the Annual Meeting of AERA, April 13, 2005, in Montreal. I would
like to thank my friend and colleague, Susan Lytle, who consulted with
me many times about the substance, structure and wording of this ad-
dress as well as the faculty and graduate student colleagues who offered
feedback on early draftsKelly Demers, Curt Dudley-Marling, Penny
Earley, Kim Fries, Kevin Koziol, Brinton Lykes, Torch Lytle, Larry
Ludlow, Diana Pullin, David Scanlon, and Ana Maria Villegas.
15 OCTOBER 2005
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1
In conversations over time, my colleague Curt Dudley-Marling has
referred to research as a rhetorical practice to emphasize that re-
searchers strategically craft both research problems and ndings in order
to be as persuasive as possible. I borrow this phrase here to refer to
teacher education as rhetorical practice.
2
I have written at length about the theoretical and interpretive frame-
works that ground my analyses of teacher education research, practice,
and policy. In the interest of space limitations, I refer readers to other
writings.
3
A full listing and discussion of these are included in Cochran-Smith
and Fries, 2005.
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AUTHOR
MARILYN COCHRAN-SMITH, the 20042005 President of AERA,
is the John E. Cawthorne Professor of Teacher Education for Urban
Schools, Lynch School of Education, Boston College, 140 Common-
wealth Avenue, Chestnut Hill, MA 02467; [email protected]. Her re-
search focuses on teacher education research, practice, and policy;
teacher research and teacher knowledge; and teaching and teacher edu-
cation for diversity, equity, and social justice.
17 OCTOBER 2005
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