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U.S. Faulted on Training of Scholars

Colleges urged to overhaul how researchers prepared.

College and university programs that prepare the nation’s education researchers suffer from mission muddle, a lack of common and rigorous standards, and inadequate resources, asserts a hard-hitting report set for release this week.

The report is all the more damning because it comes from one of the field’s own, Arthur E. Levine, who stepped down in 2005 after 12 years as the president of Teachers College, Columbia University, one of the country’s best-known education schools.

The new report, 92 pages long, is based on a four-year study of the schools, departments, and colleges of education that offer doctoral degrees in research. What Mr. Levine found, he said in an interview last week, was “worse...