Initial Teacher Education is Not That Important

BEN LEVIN, Professor and Canada Research Chair in Education Leadership and Policy. University of Toronto, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE)

Over the entire 30 plus years of my career in education people have been talking about the importance of reforming initial teacher education.  But my experience, both as a researcher and a senior official, has led me to the opposite conclusion; while better teacher education may be needed, it should be a low item on the education reform priority list, not a high priority.

I say this for two reasons.

First, changing schools through improving initial teacher education is a low impact strategy.  It will take way too long to have any effect.  Even if 10% of all teachers turn over each year, it would take many years (because much of the turnover is among new teachers) to reshape the teaching force. 

Moreover, new teachers do not change schools; schools change new teachers.  Imagine the response to a new teacher suggesting to her or his colleagues that they should dramatically alter the way they do things!  By the time they have been in the profession 5 years or so, most teachers have had their ideas and practices reshaped by the reality of their schools.  We don’t try to change medicine by changing nursing training, and we don’t change business by changing MBA programs, so why would we think that strategy would work in education?

The United States and Canada have several million teachers. Teaching is a mass occupation, and it will never be possible to fill a large occupational group only with outstanding people; there simply aren’t enough outstanding people (by definition) to go around.  So the challenge has to be to work to improve the people you have. 

Second, it is extraordinarily difficult to change teacher education.  Such changes have been under discussion for forty years at least.  In the late 1960s and early 1970s some colleges of education did bring in very different programs, only to see them return to the status quo ante a few years later.  It’s hard to change teacher education because universities are autonomous institutions, and within universities, individual faculty members have a great deal of freedom in what and how they teach.  Those freedoms, both for universities and for faculty members, are very important features of any open, democratic society, so they must be preserved.  But they surely render it almost impossible to reshape teacher education across a large number of institutions and a much larger number of faculty. 

So I say, stop focusing on initial teacher education and redirect those energies to things that can make a real different in a much shorter time (as laid out in my 2008 book, “How to change 5000 schools” – Harvard Education Press).  Those strategies would include much improved professional learning for teachers, better leadership, stronger parent engagement, and greater student engagement.  Those things can make a much bigger difference in a much shorter time.