Instead, the responsibility for practical teacher
development falls to districts and schools that hire
novice teachers—a responsibility they rarely have the
capacity to fulfill. As a result, too many new teachers
struggle to reach their students because they lack the
basic skills to do so. The fi eld of teacher preparation
is falling short of its most important responsibility:
ensuring the teachers we train are ready to do the job.
We should know. For more than a decade, our own
preparation programs produced teachers who were no
more or less effective than teachers from any other program—
some were great, some were poor, most were
about average. To us, these results were unacceptable.
Our teachers were not nearly skilled enough to consistently
help all their students achieve at high levels. We
were part of the problem.