Over the past 20 years, alternative certification for teachers has emerged as a major avenue of teacher preparation. The proliferation of new pathways has spurred heated debate over how best to recruit, prepare, and support qualified teachers. Alternative Routes to Teaching provides a thorough and dispassionate review of the research evidence on alternative certification. It takes readers beyond the simple dichotomies that have characterized the debate over alternative certification, encourages them to look carefully at the trade-offs implicit in any route into teaching, and suggests ways to “marry” the proven strengths of both traditional and alternative approaches.

Teacher education in America has changed dramatically in the past thirty years—with major implications for how our kids are taught. As recently as 1990, if a person wanted to become a public school teacher in the United States, he or she needed to attend an accredited university education program. Less than three decades later, the variety of routes into teaching is staggering. In Teaching Teachers, education historians James W. Fraser and Lauren Lefty look at these alternative programs through the lens of the past. Fraser and Lefty explain how, beginning in 1986, an extraordinary range of new teaching programs emerged, most of which moved teacher education out of universities. In some school districts and charter schools, superintendents started their own teacher preparation programs—sometimes in conjunction with universities, sometimes not. Other teacher educators designed blended programs, creating collaboration between university teacher education programs and other parts of the university, linking with school districts and independent providers, and creating a range of novel options. Fraser and Lefty argue that three factors help explain this dramatic shift in how teachers are trained: an ethos that market forces were the solution to social problems; long-term dissatisfaction with the inadequacies of university-based teacher education; and the frustration of school superintendents with teachers themselves, who can seem both underprepared and too quick to challenge established policy. Surveying which programs are effective and which are not, this book also examines the impact of for-profit teacher training in the classroom. Casting light on the historical and social forces that led to the sea change in the ways American teachers are prepared, Teaching Teachers is a substantial and unbiased history of a controversial topic.

Teachers make a difference. The success of any plan for improving educational outcomes depends on the teachers who carry it out and thus on the abilities of those attracted to the field and their preparation. Yet there are many questions about how teachers are being prepared and how they ought to be prepared. Yet, teacher preparation is often treated as an afterthought in discussions of improving the public education system. Preparing Teachers addresses the issue of teacher preparation with specific attention to reading, mathematics, and science. The book evaluates the characteristics of the candidates who enter teacher preparation programs, the sorts of instruction and experiences teacher candidates receive in preparation programs, and the extent that the required instruction and experiences are consistent with converging scientific evidence. Preparing Teachers also identifies a need for a data collection model to provide valid and reliable information about the content knowledge, pedagogical competence, and effectiveness of graduates from the various kinds of teacher preparation programs. Federal and state policy makers need reliable, outcomes-based information to make sound decisions, and teacher educators need to know how best to contribute to the development of effective teachers. Clearer understanding of the content and character of effective teacher preparation is critical to improving it and to ensuring that the same critiques and questions are not being repeated 10 years from now.

Will America find enough good teachers to staff its public schools? How can we ensure that all our children will be taught by skilled professionals? The policies that determine who teaches today are a confusing and often conflicting array that includes tougher licensing requirements, higher salaries, mandatory master's degrees, merit pay, and alternative routes to certification. Who Will Teach? examines these policies and separates those that work from those that backfire. The authors present an intriguing portrait of America's teachers and reveal who they are, who they have been, and who they will be. Using innovative statistical methods to track the professional lives of more than 50,000 college graduates, the book describes, in many cases for the first time, just how prospective, current, and former teachers respond to the incentives and disincentives they face. The authors, a group of noted educators, economists, and statisticians, find cause for serious concern. Few academically talented college graduates even try teaching, and many of those who do leave quickly, never to return. Current licensing requirements stifle innovation in training and dissuade many potentially talented teachers at the outset. But Who Will Teach? shows that we can reverse these trends if we get the incentives right. Although better salaries are essential, especially for new teachers, money is not enough. Potential teachers should be offered alternative paths into the classroom. School districts should improve their recruiting strategies. Licensing criteria should assess teaching skills, not just academic achievement and number of courses completed. The authors offer a promising strategy based on high standards and substantial rewards.

Teacher education is an evolving field with multiple pathways towards teacher certification. Due to an increasing emphasis on the benefits of field-based learning, teachers can now take alternative certification pathways to become teachers. The Handbook of Research on Field-Based Teacher Education is a pivotal reference source that combines field-based components with traditional programs, creating clinical experiences and “on-the-job” learning opportunities to further enrich teacher education. While highlighting topics such as certification design, preparation programs, and residency models, this publication explores theories of teaching and learning through collaborative efforts in pre-Kindergarten through grade 12 settings. This book is ideally designed for teacher education practitioners and researchers invested in the policies and practices of educational design.

In 1999, Liping Ma published her book Knowing and Teaching Elementary Mathematics: Teachers' Understanding of Fundamental Mathematics in the United States and China, which probed the kinds of knowledge that elementary school teachers need to convey mathematical concepts and procedures effectively to their students. Later that year, Roger Howe, a member of the U.S. National Commission on Mathematics Instruction (USNC/MI), reviewed the book for the Notices of the American Mathematical Society, concluding that it 'has lessons for all educational policymakers.' Intrigued by the idea of superrank teachers, the USNC/MI sponsored a workshop entitled 'The Teacher Development Continuum in the United States and China'. The purpose of the workshop was to examine the structure of the mathematics teaching profession in the United States and China. The main presentations and discussion from the workshop are summarized in this volume.