At a recent seminar sponsored by TC's Hechinger Institute on Education and the Media, one of the topics discussed was the quality of teachers as America replaces two million classroom teachers over the next ten years.

TC President Arthur Levine spoke extensively at the conference, following is an excerpt of a few of his comments.

• "I think in this country there are too many weak education schools. And what I think needs to happen is we need to lose the worst. We need to strengthen the weak ones and we need to invest in the really good ones."
  
• "I think students need to know two things in order to be a teacher. One thing they have to know is subject matter. If you teach math, you ought to know math ... You've also got to know something about teaching. You need to know something about how to design a curriculum. You need to know something about pedagogy -- how you teach. You need to know something about how kids learn. You need to know something about how kids develop. You need to know something about how you measure kids' accomplishments or asses it. You need to know something about testing. You need to know something about classroom management. This stuff isn't intuitive. You've got to learn it somewhere and you've got to learn it well.
• "Can we afford to put people into a classroom who don't have these things? ... If you put a bad teacher in a classroom for a year, you got at least 30 kids getting hurt that year."

This article, entitled "Quality Teachers in the Classroom" appeared in the April 12th edition of the Austin American-Statesman.

When possible, the News Bureau provides a link to the articles and a link is always provided to the online source. Not all online sources archive information and some charge a fee for older material.

Published Tuesday, Sep. 18, 2001