The Ultimate Guide to Becoming a Teacher newly published by U.S. News & World Report, takes a consumer-information approach to finding the right fit between aspiring teachers and graduate teacher education programs, while pointing out that all is not rosy in the world of teacher prep.
Joining the arsenal of U.S. News & World college guides, this one provides the by-now familiar U.S News college rankings. The “Ultimate Guide” also breaks down education schools into: the hardest and easiest ones to get into, the largest and smallest ones, and the schools whose graduates are most likely to pass state certification tests.
It also includes information on alternate routes to teaching and gives the traditional “how-to-pay for it” advice, along with state-by-state profiles of education schools offering graduate degrees.
“What I tried to do,” said author Ben Wildavsky, U.S. News’ education editor and longtime education journalist, in an interview with Career Coach, “is put all the consumer information into context. We really tried to give people a sense of what these different programs are like,” Wildavsky added.
The guide opens with Wildavsky’s take on what’s wrong with teaching, and how to fix it.
“Why is there such a concern about the quality of teacher preparation in education schools?,” he asks. “Not enough talented college graduates are entering the field, for a variety of reasons: low pay, stressful environment, lots of red tape.”
Chapter five of the guide delves “Inside Five Grad Schools,” from elite programs like Stanford University’s, which produces fewer than 85 new teachers per year, to so-called “factory schools,” like Eastern Michigan University, which churns out more than 800 ed. graduates a year.
Wildavsky suggests that aspiring teachers “cast a wide net” in searching for entrance into the profession.
“I have one friend who has a law degree who became a teacher at a private school and he’s a great social studies teacher,” he told Career Coach.
The premise of the guide, Wildavsky said, is that there really is a problem in teaching, and that the answer is not simply raising salaries.
Some experimental programs offer hope for the profession, Wildavsky said, such as the Milken Family Foundation’s Teacher Advancement Program, which aims to develop a talented teaching profession with performance-based compensation.
The public is “increasingly looking for results from teachers,” Wildavsky said. Currently, rigid pay scales and other barriers are not “powerful incentives to get people into teaching.”
