Ed School Follies: The Miseducation of America's Teachers.

• Author: Mosle, Sara

Ed School Follis: The Miseducation of America's Teachers. Rita Kramer. Free Press, $22,95. In New York City's public schools, where I taught fourth grade this past year, every teacher is required to write a lesson's "aim," or objective--"To find the main idea of a paragraph," say--on the chalkboard before class begins. If a teacher forgets, the kids will shout out: "Hey! Teacher! What's the aim?" At some schools, a teacher who fails to supply the objective during a formal (often unannounced) observation cannot receive a satisfactory rating, no matter how well the lesson goes. In a system with very little accountability, knowing the aim provides two minimal assurances: that students know what they are learning, and even more important, that teachers know what they are teaching, I've seen classes in which neither has seemed quite certain.

For a year, Rita Kramer sat at the back of the class of America's schools of education and conducted her own informal observation of the lessons they teach. Her report, a scathing indictment of more than a dozen teacher preparation programs--from Michigan State University to Peabody College at Vanderbilt to Southern Texas University--reveals an educational establishment that has lost sight of the aims of its own profession.

Many of Kramer's complaints about ed schools are familiar: Undergraduate education majors, who end up learning more about how to teach than what to teach, graduate woefully ill prepared to impart even the basics of reading and math. Graduate programs, run by career academicians long removed from the realities of the classroom, pose unnecessarily high hurdles for those who'd like to enter the profession. Kramer concludes, "Everything [would-be teachers] need to know about how to teach could be learned by intelligent people in a single summer of well-planned instruction." As proof, she offers the success of New Jersey's alternate certification program, which requies a minimum of education courses and provides onsite training and support for first-year teachers once they've entered the classroom.

Kramer floats above the fray of the ed school classrooms she visits like Mary Poppins, pointing out absurdities with the tip of her black umbrella. Her attitude is invariably censorious, in a nagging-nanny sort of way. The prudish air of Kramer's prose is unfortunate, for it undercuts the important argument that her accumulation of anecdotes makes. In classroom after classroom, Kramer learns that...