This is the new Teacher Preparation…

At a time when America’s schools are in desperate need of qualified, competant teachers, Columbia University has outlined a new plan for educating future teachers that reaks of Marxist, socialist tendenices that represent the political agenda of the American left. The program design allows for little training of competant teachers.

I have personally supervised over thirty student teachers in my career. These young professionals are sometimes full of energy, excitement, and an abiding love of children. These same young people are often woefully lacking in the preparation to manage students, write and execute outstanding lesson plans, and to engage the students in meaningful daily learning opportunties. These student teachers, on the brink of graduation, are almost all ill prepared to teach in the real world of public education. They usually are not masters of the subject matter, and have little or no comprehension of student attitudes, behavior, and motivation.

We have encouraged the local universities through several channels, including professional organizations, to design a curriculum and professional training model that prepares teachers for the rigors educating young people.

In this environment of needing competant teachers, Columbia focuses on training future liberals in diveristy and social justice. Like many professional training programs, the Columbia faculty concentrate more on furthering their political agenda than on the essential skills needed to be a master teacher.

“Our graduates choose to collaborate across differences in and beyond their school communities. They demonstrate a commitment to social justice and to serving the world while imagining its possibilities.”

The “conceptual framework” of the Coulmbia program  asserts that “educators must recognize ways in which taken-for-granted notions regarding the legitimacy of the social order are flawed, see change agency as a moral imperative, and have skills to act as agents of change.”
With Ivory Tower thinking like this at institutions of higher learning, America is still going to be searching for teacher training programs that prepare professionals to deal with America’s students.

The New York Sun has the story.

What a juxtaposition — the same week that Columbia University is celebrating merit in the form of the Nobel prize in economics awarded to Professor Edmund “Ned” Phelps, Columbia’s Teachers College is coming under justified criticism for deriding merit, favoring instead a kind of left-wing indoctrination. If that sounds like an overstatement, we invite you to check out the “conceptual framework” for Teachers College that is available for download at the Teachers College Web site. It states, “Social inequalities are often produced and perpetuated through systematic discrimination and justified by societal ideology of merit, social mobility, and individual responsibility (Strum & Guinier,[*] 1996). Traditionally organized schools help to reproduce social inequalities while giving the illusion that such inequalities are natural and fair.”