A Call for Leadership

In 1998, a Presidents’ Task Force on Teacher Education, appointed by the American Council on Education in collaboration with the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education, set out to establish “an action agenda for college and university presidents” aimed at improving the quality of teacher preparation. A year later, a report by the American Council on Education, entitled To Touch the Future: Transforming the Way Teachers are Taught and prepared with the support of Carnegie Corporation of New York and the Ford Foundation, cited the need for leadership by the presidents of our nation’s higher education institutions as the sine qua non for reforming teacher education.

Observing that as many as 2.5 million additional teachers would be needed to teach the nation’s children within the next decade, the Presidents’ Task Force on Teacher Education noted, “We know from empirical data what our intuition has always told us: Teachers make a difference,” adding, “We now know that teachers make the difference.” Solid research evidence exists to support this assertion. The Task Force pointed to a Tennessee study (Sanders and Rivers, 1996), which demonstrated with data, not intuition, that “two equally performing second graders can be separated by as many as 50 percentile points by the time they reach fifth grade, solely as a result of being taught by different teachers.” If America is to prepare the kind of teachers that can make “the difference,” according to the report, then it cannot be business as usual for presidents of the nation’s colleges and universities. The report’s recommendations challenge the presidents to develop and maintain close coordination between the faculty and courses of schools of education and arts and sciences faculty and courses; periodic and independent evaluations of teacher education programs; and continued research and development in the area of teacher preparation and performance.

After years of landmark studies conducted by distinguished commissions and task forces, it is reasonable to ask the question: Where is American education now with respect to the preparation of America’s teachers? To Touch the Future offered a response: “America stands at a point in its history where the political will to improve education is strong: We know what needs to be done and what directions to take. Our call is for colleges and universities—their faculties, academic leaders, and governing boards—led by their presidents, to take on the challenge of shaping the future of teacher education in this country.”

Hearing the Call, Designing
an Intervention

More than anything, observes Daniel Fallon, the Sanders and Rivers study produced “compelling evidence that teacher quality counts.” This study and others, he says, illustrate that “a radical reorientation of the intellectual environment” has taken place. Indeed, in an environment dominated since the 1960s by the work of James Coleman, followed by that of Christopher Jencks, notes Fallon, the notion that “student achievement relies on genetic endowment and poverty, race and class, and income and families, influenced the thinking [about education] until the 90s.” Implicit in this thinking, says Fallon, was the message that “teaching doesn’t matter.” Such a view also provided an escape hatch for the educational establishment, allowing it to reject responsibility for student failure to achieve. But given the growing consensus about the nature of effective teaching, Fallon says, “The time is right for intervention.”

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