A Failure To Work Together

From: Diverse Issues in Education
There is little coordination between federal K-12 and higher education programs charged with teacher training, even though such efforts could improve education for poor and minority students in low-quality public schools, a U.S. House of Representatives subcommittee was told Thursday. Both the Higher Education Act and the No Child Left Behind Act fund separate teacher education and improvement programs but with different rules and approaches, said George A. Scott, director of education, workforce and income security issues at the U.S. General Accountability Office. “It’s not clear to the extent these programs complement each other, and not much is known about how these laws are aligned,” he said. Schools of education are changing their approaches as needed to help improve the content knowledge and skills of prospective teachers, said Dr. Sharon P. Robinson, president of the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education. “There is considerable work to be done,” she said. “But we are not standing still.”