If teachers are to blame, who is teaching them?

The following letter appeared in the Minneapolis Star Tribune on Sunday, April 11, 2010:

The front-page story on Race to the Top ("Our $250 million weak spot: Weeding out poor teachers?,'' April 4) highlighted the collective failure of state agencies, school administrators and the teachers union to agree on ways to remove under-qualified and incompetent teachers. The point is well-taken, but the story misses a key constituency in that failure: those responsible for training teachers in the first place.

All too often, teacher preparatory centers have omitted critical elements from their core curricula. This is especially true in the area of literacy training, where a recent study by the National Council on Teacher Quality found that only a fraction of education schools even bothered to teach their clients all of the components of the science of reading.

Yes, teachers must be held accountable. But it is a cruel hoax when those whose job it is to prepare them steer them along ill-fated tangents and leave them hanging in the wind when things go terribly wrong.

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