Abstract
Reforms affecting teacher education have occurred rapidly in the U.S. beginning in the 1990s when policymakers became concerned about U.S. global competitiveness due to pupils’ low scores in international achievement tests. Several official policies have emerged over the years in response to quality concerns. Quality is understood in various ways: in terms of programs’ performance against accreditation criteria and in terms of the knowledge, skills, and dispositions that teachers are expected to have and how these are reflected on their teaching practice, but also as simply represented by pupils’ tests results which are assumed to have a direct correlation with teacher preparation and performance. In this chapter, I review pivotal policies that have influenced teacher education in the last 10 years. After an abridged overview of the system of teacher education in the U.S., I conclude with a review of the major issues affecting the field and discussing implications for future research.
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Notes
- 1.
A parallel effort was the creation of the k-12 science content standards https://www.nextgenscience.org/.
- 2.
Value Added Models or VAMs represent an econometric approximation to evaluate teacher effectiveness on pupil achievement. Their use while widely accepted in some U.S. states is generally seen as controversial in other states and have raised important concerns among educators (AERA, 2015; Amrein-Beardsley et al. 2016; Harris 2018).
- 3.
The data reported here comes from the last comprehensive Title II Report on Teacher Quality issued by the U.S. Secretary of Education in 2016 which contains data from AY 2013–2014 collected in all 50 states in the country plus the District of Columbia, American Samoa, Guam, Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Northern Mariana Islands, Palau, Puerto Rico, and Virgin Islands (U.S. Department of Education, 2016). While data continues to be collected, no such reports have been issued since the Trump Administration took office and appointed Betsy DeVos as secretary of education. The new Biden administration has appointed Miguel Cardona, a qualified educator as secretary of education and there is much hope for progress in the field. The information from the 2016 report is used in this chapter after a review of the latest data (2017–2018) follows similar trends (Title II Report 2019, 2020).
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Tatto, M.T. (2021). Teacher Education in the United States of America: An Overview of the Policies, Pathways, Issues and Relevant Research. In: Mayer, D. (eds) Teacher Education Policy and Research. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-3775-9_13
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