Schools of education and teacher education programs have been under attack for decades. They have been portrayed as “intellectual wastelands,” decried as “impractical and irrelevant” by practitioners, and cited as the root cause of bad teaching and inadequate learning (Labaree, 2004; Cochran-Smith and Zeichner, 2005). On the one side, opponents of traditional teacher preparation programs and state certification requirements argue for reducing or doing away with certification requirements, reducing the number of education courses, and increasing the number of alternative certification programs that prepare teachers in a shorter time period and without overloading them with education courses. This viewpoint is...

This chapter sets TNE in the context of the broader teacher education reform efforts in the nation. We first describe the design principles that TNE espouses; these become the focus of our later chapters on the progress of TNE implementation. We next provide a brief overview of other initiatives aimed at reforming teacher education. In particular, we focus on (1) the revamping of standards for accreditation by the two major teacher education accreditation bodies and (2) five major reform initiatives that are representative of the myriad reform efforts in the country and that encompass several higher-education institutions, much as TNE...

This chapter delineates the “theory of change” underpinning TNE and the possible outcomes that would result if the theory proves to be valid and its assumptions are met. The final section of this chapter takes a more detailed look at the proximal outputs and activities that one should observe at the TNE sites as they implement TNE. This chapter sets the context for Chapter Five, which reports implementation progress at the individual sites.

Any new program or project can be thought of as representing a theory, in that a program decisionmaker hypothesizes that a particular treatment will cause certain predicted...

As described in Chapter One, Carnegie selected the TNE institutions based on a set of criteria, including the institutions’ alignment with the TNE design principles. Table 4.1 provides an overview of the institutions at baseline (i.e., pre-TNE). The table shows that Carnegie purposefully selected a diverse array of institutions in terms of their location, type, mission, and racial-ethnic diversity of the student body. Of the TNE grantees, three are private institutions, one of which, Bank Street, is unique in that it is a stand-alone college of education. The institutions are spread across six regions of the United States.

State teacher...

This chapter provides an overview of our observations and findings on the value that the TNE design principles add to the TNE grantees’ teacher education programs and institutional cultures. These findings on the progress of implementation are based on qualitative data from our site visits at the institutions.¹ We also report the institutions’ views regarding the sustainability of TNE beyond the life of the grant. A final section presents the TNE funders’ thoughts on overall progress, impact, and sustainability of the initiative.

Overall, the TNE design principles appeal to and fit well with the teacher education programs at the TNE...

In 2001, Carnegie Corporation of New York launched an ambitious education initiative, Teachers for a New Era, to radically reform teacher education in a handful of selected institutions. Eleven colleges and universities were selected to participate in the initiative. They represent a wide variety of institutions—ranging from large, research universities to a private, stand-alone graduate school of education—that produce the nation’s school teachers. The institutions also differ considerably in the number of teacher graduates they produce each year (from 50 to more than 1,500), and they are located across the United States.

The TNE prospectus (Carnegie Corporation of...