Kate Walsh Attacks!

A few weeks ago NCTQ’s Kate Walsh described some problems with teacher preparation in this report (pdf) which is a good overview of some of the issues and good companion reading to the recent AERA tome on the issue. Yesterday she was back with a very important new study about how teachers are taught to reach reading (pdf). Walsh, on whose board of directors I sit, took a look at syllabi and courses from a random sample of teacher preparation programs and found that very few teach all the key dimensions of effective reading instruction. Considering that reading is, as they say, fundamental, this is no small thing. So far the response is the same response that greeted David Steiner, essentially that syllabi don’t really tell you much about a course. Really? If that is true then the ed school problem is even worse than it appears…Ed Week here, USA Today’s Toppo here, Ed Wonks here.

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