On the New Year’s first Dropout Nation Podcast, RiShawn Biddle takes a look at two new studies on teacher quality and explain why we can no longer depend on classroom observations in evaluating and managing performance. More than ever, objective data — especially value-added analysis of student performance — is critical to helping good-to-great teachers and the children in their care.

You can listen to the Podcast at RiShawn Biddle’s radio page or download directly to your iPod, Zune, MP3 player, smartphone, Nook Color or Kindle.  Also, subscribe to the podcast series. It is also available on iTunes, Blubrry, the Education Podcast Network,  Zune Marketplace and PodBean. Also download to your phone with BlackBerry podcast software and Google Reader.

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When it comes to math, American public education does an even poorer job on this than it does on reading. Math curricula is often subpar and the instruction is even worse. As Dropout Nation Contributing Editor Steve Peha pointed out last year in his series on overhauling classroom instruction, teachers seem to think that “reading… is an aptitude” while “math is an attitude.” One reason lies with the poor quality of math instruction in our nation’s university schools of education. Two out of 63 ed school elementary math programs surveyed by the National Council of Teacher Quality met or exceeded standards for training math teachers; just 13 percent of 77 education schools surveyed by NCTQ three years ago had high quality math programs. As a result, even efforts to develop rigorous curriculum and underlying standards for math instruction may fail in classrooms because far too many teachers, especially at the elementary level, just don’t know how to do the work. Making elementary school instruction more specialized (and thus allowing students to be taught by specialists in math) will help in the long run. But until then, we must address the math instruction problem in schools today.

This moment is so important for math instruction the more than 40 states that have adopted Common Core standards. We are on the eve of significantly ramping up its implementation. I’m looking forward to the Standards for Mathematical Practice. I have a lot to say about these eight mandates, which are repeated on each page of the Common Core content standards in each grade. They appear as a floating reminder that math instruction is not (only) about memorization and regurgitation, but about deep understanding, proof and argumentation, focused exploration and interpretation.

But I’m convinced that the Standards for Mathematical Practice are doomed to fail in most schools. Why? Because it seems that most teachers and principals don’t understand a simple fact: to teach elementary school math well, you have to know elementary school math really well. And most people simply don’t understand much when it comes to elementary school math.

I don’t know what teacher preparation programs are doing out there when it comes to math instruction. But from my experience in hiring teachers and my stint as an adjunct in one program, my guess is that if there is a math course in most of them it consists of something like, “Here’s the Harcourt Brace textbook. Here’s the Saxon textbook. Here’s the Scott Foresman textbook. Here are some tricks for teaching long division.”

One of the beautiful babies in the bathwater of teacher preparation is the program I went through at Bank Street College. At Bank Street, my math mentor taught me that children need to struggle with mathematical concepts, and teachers need to guide them through that struggle with strategic questioning that builds understanding, always with the next math concept in mind. Children also should know why they are learning math concepts and facts, and have an authentic contextual basis for their study. You can’t simply give the answer or else a child won’t think it through.

But, the easiest thing for a teacher to do is to give the answer, and demand that the kids memorize it. After all, that’s what Scott Foresman tells you to do. Teaching math progressively is far from the fluffy, no-facts, fuzzy math of popular culture. If done correctly, it’s a far more rigorous and intellectually demanding exercise than traditional math instruction on the part of the teacher.

But many math teachers lack math knowledge and competency. It isn’t addressed in common core. And there is no concern for this problem from graduate programs for this problem. What are we to do?

As always, in times of crisis, I turn to books for advice. (Real books, written by authors, not textbooks written by committees, that is.) I’m not talking about how-to books, manuals of how to teach mathematics. I’ll take plenty of time to explore those in a future post, including books by Marilyn Burns and Cathy Fosnot among others. I’m talking about books that inspire or make clear the importance of loving and learning more about math.

Luckily there are a few friendly books out there that do a good job of either laying bare the crisis of math deficits or of explicating just why it’s so beneficial to understand math. Here are some of them. And feel free to recommend more. (And please, don’t say, “The McGraw Hill series has some great looking times tables in it.”):

Innumeracy by John Allen Paulos: Paulos wrote this tract around 25 years ago but its message is still relevant. While there is tremendous shame associated with illiteracy, society still finds it acceptable to be innumerate. And the consequences for that portion of our society that can’t read a stock table or tell an increasing rate of oil production in a foreign power from a drop in GDP from one quarter to the next extend far beyond the realm of whether 2 + 2 is always equal to 4.

How Mathematics Happened: The First 50,000 Years by Peter Rudman: Rudman is not quite a feminist, and you have to avert your eyes at some of the turns of phrase, but he brilliantly catalogs the timeline of the use of mathematical concepts beginning with our hunter gatherer days. Two powerful ideas I took away from this book are that (a) the development of mathematical knowledge in our concept mirrors the development of these concepts in individual children (that’s self-similar like a fractal, although he doesn’t use those words; you will if you love math as much as I do) and (b) there really is a reason why we should explore our base-10 system and other bases with children as we study math. I hadn’t understood it before, but after reading this book every time I look at a clock I think about it.

Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter: As I’m kind of slogging through it right now (because it’s dense, not because it isn’t interesting), this tome is not nearly as accessible a read as the two books above. It didn’t win the Pulitzer Prize for nothin’—the author calls it a “metaphorical fugue” inspired by Lewis Carroll, and that’s pretty much what it is, tracing the history of mathematical thinking about patterns and puzzles, their relation to paradoxes, music and computers. Imagine Willy Wonka wrote an autobiography but his obsession was puzzles, not chocolate.

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One of the ongoing discussions in the battle over reforming American public education is the future of the nation’s university schools of education, which train most of the nation’s new teachers. With their failures to improve the quality of teacher training, unwillingness to tighten up their recruiting of aspiring teachers, inability to adapt to the growing need for teaching to be perceived as a sophisticated and attractive profession for talented collegians, and unwillingness to play their part in stemming the nation’s education crisis, one wonders whether they deserve to continue to exist. As Linda Darling-Hammond has pointed out, ed school training is in the same state as medical school training was before Abraham Flexnor’s groundbreaking efforts in the early 20th century forced their revamp. The emergence of Teach for America and other alternative teacher training programs not tethered to ed schools has also provided new competition to the ed school crowd. And while some reformers — including Arthur McKee of the National Council on Teacher Quality — argue that ed schools still have value, even they declare that ed schools need to change.

In this Best of Dropout Nation, culled from a Three Thoughts column that ran in November 2011, Editor RiShawn Biddle explains why ed schools (along with current approaches to professional development) may be heading to history’s ashbin. Read, consider, and offer your own thoughts.

When it comes to training teachers and improving their skills, this is clear:  The nation spends a lot on it ($7 billion alone on training aspiring teachers); there are a lot of ed schools involved in handling this work (1,200 of them); professional development can be profitable for the players who provide it (including consultants like “culture of poverty” promulgator Ruby Payne, and ed schools); and the results are atrocious. Forget the low quality of instruction in our nation’s schools and a dropout crisis which saps the futures of 1.3 million kids every year: Teachers, administrators and policymakers alike don’t even think the training is of any value.

The critical reason is that teacher training and professional development is garbage in, garbage out and garbage in-between. Former Teachers College President Arthur Levine pointed out in a 2006 study that 54 percent of the nation’s teachers are taught at colleges with low admission requirements. Once aspiring teachers are admitted, they’re not likely to get the training they need to get the job done. As the National Council on Teacher Quality noted in its recent study, just one in five of the 53 ed schools it surveyed in Illinois adequately trained their students in reading instruction, and only five schools had strong, rigorous undergraduate elementary school instruction. Many ed school professors think they don’t have an obligation to actually ensure that teachers have strong subject knowledge competency or skill in instructional methods (much less actually have entrepreneurial drive, strong leadership ability and care for all kids); they would rather focus on theories of learning that involve some vague notions about schools as democracies instead of teaching teachers how to teach. The fact that Jason Kamras’, John Taylor Gattos and Jaime Escalantes emerge from the muck and mire is more a testament to their fortitude than to the ed schools from which they graduated.

Meanwhile the professional development is well, abysmal. Just 132 of 1,200 professional development programs surveyed by the U.S. Department of Education focused on reading, math and science; only nine actually met federal What Works Clearinghouse standards for quality and outcomes. Meanwhile there is little evidence that site-based professional development teams — in which teams of teachers meet to brainstorm and learn from one another — works either. Which makes sense: If America’s teacher corps is largely mediocre, then all you have happening is laggard teachers learning from other laggards. Meanwhile the one area of professional development that doesn’t really get called that — graduate and post-graduate training by ed schools — essentially functions as a way for teachers to take advantage of degree-based pay scales. If the ed school did a poor job of training teachers at the undergrad level, then it won’t do such a hot job in post-grad.

So should we save ed schools or professional development. The organization that is supposed to ensure that teacher training is of high quality, the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education, declared this week in its report that ed schools must move to a “clinical practice” model that emphasizes mentoring by experienced teachers. As reported by Education Week in its special report on professional development, there are new and novel efforts going on to improve post-graduate teacher training. This is all nice. But it may be too little too late.

For example, the NCATE study suggests that ed schools should work with traditional school districts — especially urban systems — to develop training programs that actually match their needs. Ed schools have called for this for years to no avail. Some have already begun to move on from ed schools, working with outfits such as Urban Teacher Residency United and The New Teacher Project to form their own training programs. Suburban and rural districts, who struggle with the same issues, could begin doing so as well. Just imagine if consortia of districts or even, say, states such as California, Nevada and Arizona teamed up with a Teach For America to do mass-scale teacher training? One could also imagine groups of high-quality teachers developing apprenticeship programs of their own independent of teachers unions, districts and ed schools, taking aspiring teachers under their wing and having them work in classrooms; this throwback to the old guild concept would certainly work better than the high-cost system in place today. Such efforts, along with private-sector run teacher training courses, could be the wave of the future.

Sure, as NCTQ President Kate Walsh points out, ed schools train more than 90 percent of all new teachers. But at this point, there are only a few ed schools — notably Teachers College — that deserve the name.  If the rest were shut down and replaced with alternative certification programs, American public education wouldn’t be any worse for wear. In fact, we may actually get better teachers and better schools. As for the professional development? What is needed is something better than the status quo.

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Your editor would like to say that the National Education Association’s recent suggestions for overhauling traditional teacher training and compensation will actually lead the union to take meaningful action. After all, the plan, on its face, isn’t exactly objectionable. Requiring aspiring teachers to work for a year in classrooms under the watchful eye of a high-quality master teacher would certainly do plenty to improve teacher training; it also dovetails with recommendations made earlier this year by National Council on Teacher Quality and also demands the nation’s university schools of education to step up their game in giving their trainees real world experience.

The union’s recommendation for creating new teaching career paths — including positions such as master teachers — also makes sense. While such ideas have been bandied about for the past decade, it is still worth pursuing as part of the much-needed overhaul of traditional teacher compensation. And its pronounced support for largely abandoning reverse-seniority layoff rules is a real and important concession for which the union should be applauded.

The NEA’s recommendations are worth considering. But there are problems.

For one, the NEA plan’s emphasis on using peer review in evaluating teachers may be a modest improvement over the useless systems of scheduled observations that are now in place throughout the country. But peer review is only good at addressing observable aspects of teaching such as managing classrooms and lesson plans. It cannot address the more-important unobservable aspects of teaching: the ability to improve student achievement over time. Peer review also doesn’t move away from the subjective biases of the reviewers. What one group of teachers may think is high-quality teaching may not actually be so once one looks at test score data; it also assumes that teachers know exactly what to look for themselves, a stretch given that teaching, as currently structured in most districts, is a solo activity in which instructors have plenty of autonomy.

The NEA’s recommendation that aspiring teachers should pass a test that examines their skills in areas such as classroom management also seems to make sense at first — until one realizes that the better solution is to improve the quality of aspiring teachers admitted into ed schools in the first place. As teaching guru Martin Haberman has pointed out, this can be done rather easily. Simply seeing how an aspiring teacher interacts with a child of a different socioeconomic background would weed out those who have no capacity to empathize with children. Embracing Teach For America’s approach of looking for candidates with strong entrepreneurial drive — the ability to be self-starters who can face down challenges — would also make sense. And simply looking at the subject-matter competency of an aspiring teacher before letting them into ed school programs would weed out plenty of men and women who would be better off in other fields. None of these suggestions, by the way, have made their way onto the NEA’s list of reforms.

Meanwhile the NEA’s recommendations for new teaching career paths neglects the need for other changes. As Dropout Nation pointed out in September, the actual work of teaching remains in the same state as the medical profession was in the 19th and early 20th centuries. As doctors in those periods were expected to be jacks of all trades instead of being allowed to become dedicated specialists working efficiently in hospitals and practices, teachers — especially those at the elementary school level — are expected to be general practitioners when it makes more sense for them (and for schools) to become master specialists in aspects of student learning. But as Los Angeles Times revealed last year in its value-added analysis of elementary teachers working in the L.A. Unified School District (and as noted in Dropout Nation‘s own report on Shirley Avenue Elementary in suburban Reseda), few teachers are strong in both teaching reading and math; most are either strong or barely treading water in one of the two subjects. Recommending additional specialization, something that researchers Brian A. Jacob and Jonah Rockoff largely recommend in a Brookings Institution report released in September, is something that the NEA and its teacher quality panel should have done.

All that said, at least the NEA’s plan is a starting point. Whether or not it even gets mentioned by the union beyond some of national President Dennis Van Roekel’s talking points is a different story. Why? Because the biggest obstacle to the NEA advocating for these plans is the union itself.

As with so much with the NEA when it comes to teacher quality, the union has generally been all talk and even less substance. As Dropout Nation has noted over the past couple of months, the NEA helped kibosh the one provision within the now-moribund Harkin-Enzi plan for reauthorizing the No Child Left Behind Act that was its saving grace: Requiring states to use student test score data in teacher and principal evaluations. The union’s longstanding opposition to overhauling traditional teacher performance management — including the use of value-added assessment of test score data in evaluating teacher performance — along with its defense of last hired-first fired provisions its recommendations now decry pretty much show that the union talks out of both sides of its proverbial mouth.

Meanwhile the NEA hasn’t exactly shown that it is abandoning the ed school lobby that helped foster this state of affairs in teacher training in the first place. Since 2005-2006, the union has handed off $2.3 million to the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education, which is charged with elevating standards for ed school training, and has been a generous supporter of the American Association of Colleges of Teacher Education (which represents the interests of ed schools).  The NEA has also spent plenty on supporting the very ed school professors who are a culprit for why America’s teachers are so poorly trained. Essentially, the union hasn’t used its vast financial resources to either reward the ed school crowd for reforming their recruiting and training efforts — and has been less interested in punishing them for their failures.

Then there’s the union’s self-preservation problem. Talking about overhauling teacher training and compensation makes the NEA look good, but actually pushing for such reforms would actually hurt the union’s bottom line. After all, if the NEA truly embraced its own reforms and supported even more-progressive efforts (including more-rigorous evaluations based on student performance and ending tenure), it would mean fewer aspiring teachers coming into the ed schools, fewer teacher trainees entering classrooms, and, given that just one percent of teachers regardless of seniority are currently dismissed, more teachers (regardless of experience) losing their jobs. This isn’t tenable for a union which has lobbied for more teachers and smaller class sizes for the past four decades — and definitely not tolerable for a union that has made near-lifetime employment and seniority privileges a critical component of teacher compensation.

More importantly, if the NEA actively pushed for even these largely cosmetic reforms, it would have to tacitly admit that its old-school model of employee-management relations — which it, along with the American Federation of Teachers, borrowed from the industrial trade unions — no longer makes sense. This is especially true because we are in a time in which the success of teachers in improving student achievement can be easily measured, and in which evidence shows that the very traditional teacher compensation systems the NEA defends are both ineffective in spurring student achievement, and worthless in attracting aspiring teacher to — and keeping them in — the profession. The fact the NEA still supports rewarding teachers for being certified by the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards in spite of the growing evidence that such certification doesn’t equal improved student outcomes (and doesn’t bring more high-quality teachers to urban classrooms) still shows that the union remains hidebound to failed past practices.

This isn’t to say that the NEA can’t, at some point, embrace systemic reform in a meaningful way. But doing so would require the union to abandon traditional public education practices that have sustained its business and philosophy. This, along with embracing systemic reforms in other aspects of education, would also force the union to abandon the interests of their most-influential of their rank-and-file base: Baby Boomers each of whom average a salary of at least $54,400 a year (and more if they have advanced degrees), near-lifetime employment, defined-benefit pensions that can pay out as much as $2 million over a lifetime, and nearly-free healthcare both during working careers and into retirement. These members, including NEA leaders such as Van Roekel, are loathe to lose the benefits and privileges for which they have long worked. And as a result, the union can’t really be a force for the kind of changes that will help all children succeed in school and in life.

The consequences of this unwillingness to go hard on systemic reform are borne by American public education as a whole — and not just the kids who are stuck in failure mills with laggard teachers. Younger, more reform-minded teachers who now make up the majority of NEA rank-and-file members, are hamstrung by practices that put low-quality teachers on the same footing as high-quality counterparts, deny them the kind of rewards and recognition they rightfully deserve for improving student achievement. and create cultures of mediocrity in which good-to-great work and innovative efforts are likely to be ostracized less-talented colleagues. It also makes it harder to bring talented collegians into the profession. After all, why would a talented math student go into what is perceived to be an unsophisticated low-paying profession when sectors such as tech (and even high-paying blue-collar jobs) offer reap greater financial and reputational rewards?

Ultimately, the NEA will have to walk the proverbial talk in order to win anyone over. And do more than offer some useful talking points for Van Roekel’s next greetings.

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When it comes to teacher quality reform, it is clear that the National Education Association likes to talk from both sides of its proverbial mouth. Even as its president, Dennis Van Roekel, proclaims support for efforts such as the proposed ed school accountability plan proposed by U.S. Secretary Arne Duncan, the nation’s largest teachers’ union works hard to successfully scuttled efforts such as the recently-excised proposal in the Harkin-Enzi plan for reauthorizing the No Child Left Behind Act that would have required states use student test score data in teacher and principal evaluations.

So it is curious to see the NEA join together with 80 other organizations — including fellow-travelers such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (along with its legal defense fund), and the American Association for Colleges of Teacher Education — in demanding that Senate Democrats actually be concerned about teacher quality when they mark up the Harkin-Enzi plan this morning. Under the umbrella of the so-called National Coalition on Teacher Quality, the NEA and its allies say they are concerned that the Harkin-Enzi plan “undermines the critical goal of providing all children with equal access to competent teachers”. From where they sit, the plan essentially renders No Child’s Highly Qualified Teacher provision meaningless by allowing “untrained, novice teachers” to teach poor and minority kids, and thus denying them experienced, competent instructors. And they want Senate Democrats to pass an amendment being offered up by Vermont’s Bernie Sanders that would “address our concerns.”

It would be nice to think that the NEA signed on to this letter because it actually cares about helping poor and minority kids get high-quality teachers. But that would require your editor to suspend all forms of reasonable skepticism. The real issue has actually has little to do with preserving the No Child’s Highly Qualified Teacher provision — which even most reformers agree is already rather meaningless thanks to moves by states to grandfather in veteran teachers. Instead, it is about the longstanding effort by the NEA and their allies among the nation’s university schools of education to stop the expansion of Teach For America and other alternative teacher certification programs, the vanguards of the teacher quality reform movement.

Under Harkin-Enzi, new teachers trained by TFA, The New Teacher Project and other alternative teacher training outfits could be considered Highly Qualified under federal law. The proposal, in part a response to a federal Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruling handed down last year that struck down efforts to allow those aspiring teachers (many of whom hadn’t yet received full certification in California and other states covered by that appellate court) to be considered highly qualified under federal law. Congress allowed for this to happen last year during one of the many wranglings over the federal budget. But now, Harkin and Enzi are pushing to ensure that it remains codified under No Child, the latest version of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act that is the centerpiece of federal education policy.

This doesn’t sit well with either the NEA or its fellow-travelers among the nation’s ed schools, which train all but a smattering of the nation’s 200,000 newly-minted teachers entering the profession. So they have recruited Sanders — who has never met a teachers’ union proposal (or any union plan) he didn’t like — to counter Harkin’s and Enzi’s plan on this front. Under his proposal, TFA and TNTP trainees couldn’t be considered Highly Qualified until they either passed state certification or been trained in an ed school (or other state-approved teacher training program). This would particularly hurt TNTP, the offshoot of TFA, which provides new teachers to some of the nation’s most reform-minded districts. Add in the fact that 23 states don’t allow for any alternate teacher training programs of any kind, and suddenly, you now have new restrictions on innovative ways of training teachers — which would certainly please the ed school crowd.

Now, one can argue reasonably that newly-trained teachers coming out of alternative teacher training programs are still rookies, and thus, haven’t proven themselves to be high-quality teachers. But this is true of all rookie teachers, especially those from ed schools. As University of Washington Bothell scholars Dan Goldhaber and Stephanie Liddle  noted in a recently-released report on teacher quality in Washington State’s schools, teachers with three-to-five years of experience outperform those just entering the profession by at least six-percent of a standard deviation based on the model. (But teachers generally don’t improve their performance after four years on the job.)

But this argument over certification is senseless. A decade of research has largely proven that there is little correlation between a teacher’s certification and their success in improving student achievement. Essentially, the nation’s system of teacher certification has largely been a failure when it comes to ensuring high-quality instructors for traditional public and charter schools, regardless of the backgrounds of the children they serve. And No Child’s Highly Qualified Teacher provision, while a good idea when it was first enacted as part of that law’s passage a decade, is not worth preserving in its current form, especially in an age in which we have some tools to identify high-quality instructors.

What is starting to come to fore is that there is some slight correlation between the kind of institution training aspiring teachers and student achievement. And in some cases, the ed schools are coming up short compared to their alternative counterparts (many of which, by the way, are affiliates of these very ed schools). In Louisiana, for example, TNTP was the state’s top teacher training program when it comes to mathematics, with its graduates performing two times better than the best traditional ed school, housed at the University of New Orleans (UNO’s graduates, in turn, only slightly outperformed their traditional ed school peers). And over the past few years, studies have shown that TFA grads either perform as well or outperform their traditional ed school counterparts.

The real issue isn’t that TFA trainees and their colleagues from other alternative certification programs shouldn’t be designated Highly Qualified. The real issue is that the current system of recruiting, training, paying and evaluating America’s teachers is ineffective in ensuring that every child has a chance at being taught by a high-quality teacher. From the reality that 54 percent of teachers are trained at universities with low entrance requirements, to the abysmal quality of teacher preparation by many of those schools, to the system of seniority- and degree-based pay scales that reward teachers for merely occupying space instead of for successful work in helping children succeed, to seniority-based privileges that allow experienced teachers to leave schools serving poor kids for what they consider to be better spots (and also allow laggard veterans to bump better-performing junior colleagues from their assignments), all of our children — especially our poorest and minority kids — are cheated out of high-quality instruction. Sanders’ amendment won’t do a wit to solve this problem.

What can improve teacher quality — and help every child get the high-quality teaching they deserve — is the restructure of the entire process of recruiting, training, and managing the performance of teachers. One step in achieving this element of systemically reforming education lies in requiring the use of Value-Added analysis of student test data in evaluating teachers, something that the Harkin-Enzi plan for revamping No Child originally aimed to do. But the NEA, along with the American Federation of Teachers, strongly opposed that effort (along with the Obama administration’s Race to the Top initiative, which has nudged states such as New York in taking those steps). The NEA would also likely oppose one of Dropout Nation‘s suggestions for teacher quality reform: Launching a Race to the Top-styled program that would award states and districts additional dollars in exchange for abolishing near-lifetime employment for teachers in the form of tenure (one of the reasons behind the abysmal quality of America’s teaching corps) and enacting laws that would only allow a teacher to be considered high-quality after proving that they can improve student achievement consistently over the first five years of their career. After all, they would lose more than a few dues-paying members.

Add in the fact that the NEA continues to finance the efforts of ed schools to avoid reform — including $252,262 the union gave in 2008-2009 to the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education, the main trade group for ed schools — and it’s hard to take the NEA seriously when it comes to the matter of teacher quality. Actually, when it comes to actually doing something to improve the teaching profession — and helping poor and minority kids get high-quality instruction — the NEA doesn’t live up to the mission statement Van Roekel touts constantly during his speeches.

But this is one matter that can’t be laid at the feet of the NEA alone. A number of the signatories that are supposed to be dedicated to improving education for black and Latino children — including the NAACP — also deserve look askance for joining common cause with the union for supporting amendment that will actually do little to improve teacher quality. The NAACP, which hasn’t covered itself in glory on the school reform front, should be particularly ashamed for continuing an alliance with the NEA that harms the very black children it vows to protect and defend.

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On this special Conversation with Editor RiShawn Biddle, Arthur McKee of the National Council on Teacher Quality offers an opposing view on Dropout Nation‘s commentaries on the future of ed schools. While he defends the need for their existence, McKee also argues that their efforts in teacher training and education research are sorely in need of reform.

You can listen to the Podcast at RiShawn Biddle’s radio page or download directly to your iPod, Zune, MP3 player, smartphone, Nook Color or Kindle.  Also, subscribe to the Conversation podcast series and the overall Dropout Nation Podcast series. It is also available on iTunes, Blubrry, the Education Podcast Network,  Zune Marketplace and PodBean. Also download to your phone with BlackBerry podcast software and Google Reader.

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