Traditional Teacher Education Still Matters: Healthy Doses of Theory Plus Clinical Practice Still Lays a Solid Foundation for New Teachers

My first classroom in a public high school was as typical as it could be. The room was overcrowded, the back row filled with students reading below grade-level, the front row with students on the advanced track. The week before school, hardly any parents attended the school's open house, and, on top of that, I had no real classroom to call my own. But on the first day of my first year as a teacher, I still felt ready for the challenge of being a teacher. It was Sept. 6, 2011, and with a deep breath I murmured a half-confident, Welcome to American history! Let's begin! Half afraid because I was finally there, standing in front of 30 strangers. But I was somehow self-assured because I had actually already been there, observed exactly what I was doing, and had reflected deeply for the last 3 1/2 years. What confidence I could muster was due primarily to my training at the University of Mary Washington's College of Education. Yes, even in this reform-obsessed culture of education, I owe my success to a traditional route to the classroom, the same path that thousands of other new teachers follow every year. Academics and policy makers alike have talked endlessly about the high attrition rates of teachers during their first few years in the profession and about whether traditional or alternative pathways to teaching create more effective teachers. Everybody, it seems, has an idea about how to prepare the next generation of teachers. I completed my teacher training through the often scorned and demeaned pathway--the liberalarts teacher school. As a high-quality education becomes an even greater determinant of success, I share Diane Ravitch's (2012) sentiment that teacher education should be the centerpiece of school reform strategy. While many states have loosened requirements to enter teaching, high-achieving countries, such as Finland, maintain teaching as a celebrated career by demanding strict requirements for entry. Between 2004 and 2008, about 300,000 teachers, or roughly 10% of the U.S. teaching force, retired (Carroll & Foster, 2010). With the mean age of public school teachers rising, an estimated 2.9 to 5.1 million teachers must join the workforce by 2020 just to keep up with demand (Aaronson & Meckel, 2009). Replacing retirees' invaluable expertise will become the defining factor in educating American children in the 2020s and 2030s. So, now is not the time to debase any program that tries to prepare quality educators for America's public schools. Unions should acknowledge that alternative licensure pathways encourage some of the most talented professionals to enter teaching late in their careers. Likewise, alternative teacher preparation programs should not forsake those who decide to make careers in the public school classroom at an early age and who receive training in ethical foundations and reflective practice. A 100-minute film or a stump speech to teachers cannot define the problems associated with teacher preparedness nor offer the grand panacea to remedy educations' ills. Regardless the path a teacher takes into the profession, he or she must meet certain ethical and professional standards. These standards are not necessarily the ones I had to complete for my Virginia collegiate professional license, nor are they identical to the criteria outlined by my college professors. My experience in a traditional college-teacher education instilled in me a sense of ethics, compassion, a demand for reflective practice, and a robust guiding philosophy. What I learned in the university classroom I took six classes in my teacher-preparation program. Topics ranged from constructivism and backwards design to an introduction to special education, with an emphasis on legal implications. Labeling traditional teacher-education courses as useless and a waste of time may be politically popular, but I learned real lessons by studying abstract principles and educational theorists. …