YET ANOTHER RIGHTWING WHACKO ATTACK...:

An apple for the secretary (Ruben Navarrette, October 28, 2009, San Diego Union Tribune)

In a speech at Columbia University's Teachers College, [Arne] Duncan delivered a stinging critique of the schools that trained most of the more than 3 million teachers who currently work in U.S. public schools.

“By almost any standard,” Duncan told an audience of student teachers and faculty, “many if not most of the nation's 1,450 schools, colleges and departments of education are doing a mediocre job of preparing teachers for the realities of the 21st-century classroom.”

The word “mediocre” had extra bite because teachers colleges are, as Time magazine put it, “the stepchildren of the American university system.”

Duncan is onto something. With so much scrutiny aimed at measuring student performance from kindergarten through high school, many education reformers never get around to asking embarrassing questions about how well teachers are doing in their profession, where they got their training, how much they learned, and what can be improved. Until we start scrutinizing this part of the process, and look at who is teaching the teachers, we'll never empower students to reach their academic potential and create a work force that is globally competitive.