Sec of Ed to attack school today

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is planning to attack teacher training programs in a speech he will give at Columbia University today. In the advance copy of Duncan’s remarks, Duncan states that many colleges do “a mediocre job of preparing teachers for the realities of the 21st-century classroom.”

From The Washington Post:

Duncan’s speech points out two major deficiencies in education school teaching with which most critics would agree: They do a bad job teaching students how to manage disruptive classrooms, particularly in low-income neighborhoods, and they don’t offer much in the way of training new teachers how to use data to improve their classroom results.

It is unclear from Duncan’s advance text whether or not he will provide specific direction to schools of education floundering in their attempts to produce decent teachers.

Perhaps this is just as well: Duncan’s department isn’t constitutional anyway, so he really doesn’t have any business criticizing any schools in the first place.

Allie Winegar Duzett is an intern at the American Journalism Center, a training program run by Accuracy in Media and Accuracy in Academia.

*Blog entries by interns reflect their personal opinions only and not that of Accuracy and Academia.

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