![Sample our Education journals, sign in here to start your access, latest two full volumes FREE to you for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5932/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Education.jpg"})
Abstract
There is now unprecedented emphasis on teacher quality in the USA and in many nations around the world with extremely high expectations for teacher performance. Based on the assumption that education and the economy are inextricably linked, it is now assumed that teachers can – and should – teach all students to world‐class standards, serve as the linchpins in educational reform, and produce a well‐qualified labor force to preserve the nation’s position in the global economy. This article builds on the argument that during the late 1990s and into the early 2000s, a ‘new teacher education’ emerged in the USA, which was constructed as a public policy problem, based on research and evidence, and driven by outcomes. This new teacher education is both for better and for worse. The article suggests that the trends that characterized the emergence of the new teacher education have continued and intensified, especially in light of larger national and global policy and political issues. Cochran‐Smith argues that education scholars who care about public education need to build on the most promising aspects of the new teacher education, but also challenge its narrowest aspects by working with others both within and against the system to change the terms of the debate.
Notes
1. See Cochran‐Smith and Fries (Citation2005) for a detailed discussion of more than a dozen research syntheses that are related to the questions of policy‐makers.
2. ‘Teach for America’ is an alternate pathway into teaching, which recruits graduates from highly selective colleges and universities and offers a very brief summer preparation prior to their becoming teachers of record in classrooms in poor urban and rural areas in the USA.