U.S. elementary teachers get far less training than teachers in high-achieving countries for deep understanding of the content they teach, finds a study by the Center on International Education Benchmarking.
The study finds education systems in Japan, Finland, Hong Kong, and Shanghai have disparate approaches to primary teacher training. But all of their teacher-education systems focus more than U.S. programs do on pedagogical content knowledge. U.S. teacher training programs required less initial content knowledge in foundational reading, math, and science and dedicated less course time to training teachers in that content.
