This week’s This is Dropout Nation report on the continuing problems of America’s ed schools garnered some interesting responses. One of them came from Dimitri Sevastapoulo, a Harris Brown Stevens real estate broker who, before going into that arena, taught in New York City public schools, headed up the high school division of the famed Dalton School in New York City, and presided over the board of the Caedmon School, a private Montessori school that his child attends. He notes that a decade ago, when he tried to go back to New York University to complete his master’s degree in education, he was told that his “credits were stale” and had to begin the whole process of getting that degree again.

What he figured out? Writes Sevastapoulo: “A graduate degree in education is an expensive, worthless piece of paper.” More importantly, he notes that “competence in a serious field of study… accountability and dedication are the key ingredients for good teaching.” His points are on the mark.

Meanwhile Devon Skerritt, who manages the volunteer operations at Harvard’s ed school, takes issue with Dropout Nation‘s surmising that ed schools are probably no longer useful. For Skerritt, the idea of eliminating ed schools leads to the bigger question of “how do we create/support strong scholars’ research in ed?”Certainly, this is an important question. After all, ed schools are generally the centers of research in education. At the same time, however, one must remember that education research, like ed school training, isn’t close to being in tip-top shape. As my former Forbes editor, Seth Lubove, noted a decade in his report on the controversy surrounding the Success for All reading program, the education research field is often so incestuous that a supposed peer reviewer can also have a business relationship with the researcher presenting the data (and not recuse themselves in light of the conflict).  The interpretations by researchers can also be so agenda-driven that even if underlying data is solid, it becomes sullied by association. As a result, education research isn’t as exacting as it is in more-rigorous hard- and social science fields.

Education research is getting better. But ed schools haven’t been the ones driving this. The development of Value-Added Assessment, for example, was driven by William Sanders, first while running the University of Tennessee’s assessment center (which was run independent of the education school), and then, when he worked for privately-held software outfit SAS. The pioneering work of Paul Hill, Paul Peterson, Jonah Rockoff, Michael Podgursky and Marguerite Roza have also happened outside of ed school confines. And when one starts to look at the graduation rate and dropout crisis efforts of Robert Balfanz, Jay P. Greene, Christopher Swanson, and Michael Holzman, it slowly becomes clear that ed schools have lagged far behind in developing pioneering research addressing the underlying issues of the nation’s education crisis.

This isn’t to say that ed schools can’t exist in order to have strong research roles. It’s just that they haven’t actually taken up such work. Far too many ed school professors are either too busy maintaining the status quo within their institutions — or trying to make names for themselves as poor man’s Diane Ravitches — than improving the quality of education research conducted within their respective institutions.

Skerritt also notes, rightfully, that there are some ed schools that are doing fantastic work in training teachers and principals. It may be time to follow the path of Abraham Flexner, whose Carnegie Corp.-funded review of medical schools led to improvements in how doctors are selected into med schools, shut down laggard institutions, and spurred innovation and better training throughout the medical field. Ed schools clearly need the same kind of housecleaning. If they don’t change, they should move aside for better institutions for training the teachers our children need for their success in school and in life.

We will talk more about this issue on Wednesday, when Dropout Nation hosts a special podcast on the future of ed schools featuring Arthur McKee of the National Council on Teacher Quality. He will argue for the existence of ed schools, but also for the full reform of their work in training teachers.

When it comes to America’s system of training teachers, two things are crystal clear. The first? That America’s university schools of education, which train nearly all of the 200,000 or so teachers who attempt to enter the profession every year, are doing a shoddy job of recruiting aspiring teachers and providing them with the skills and knowledge they need to succeed in the classroom. The second: That there is no correlation between the credentials teachers are granted and their ability to improve student achievement over time.

This week, two studies once again confirm both realities. And it is past time to take real action to improve the teacher training pipeline so that our kids get the high-quality education they deserve.

The first bit of latest news comes courtesy of the American Enterprise Institute, which released a study earlier this week on the abysmally high levels of grade inflation among ed school majors. The average ed school student at Indiana University’s ed school on its main campus in Bloomington had a simple grade-point average of 3.66, higher than the g.p.a.’s of students in the university’s other majors; as the study’s author, Cory Koedel notes in another study he conducted this year, math, science and economics majors only average g.p.a.’s of 3.06 , while those taking social science and humanities courses barely average over a 3.0.

At the University of Missouri’s ed school, the average student garners a simple g.p.a. of 3.80, nearly a full point higher than a student majoring in math, science and economics. Only psychology ranks as the second-easiest major on its campus — and even an average student in that major is only rewarded a 3.43. In fact, every student received a 4.0 g.p.a. in one out of every five ed school classes they took, a far higher percentage than what students in other majors ever receive. Stated simply, an ed school student has a one-in-five chance of earning an easy “A” regardless of their work product.

Essentially, ed school professors — many of whom have sparse experience in the classroom — are doling out too many high grades far too often, providing students with unrealistic assessments of their ability to perform in the classroom. This isn’t surprising: As former Teachers College president Arthur Levine surmised six years ago, one out of every two teachers in America are trained at schools with low entrance requirements. The results that are seen in our classrooms are even less shocking. As longtime teaching guru Martin Haberman has noted, half of all aspiring teachers never make it into the classroom, while Richard Elmore has pointed out that half of those who did get employed left the profession within five years — and this in spite of the fact that in most states, teachers attain near-lifetime employment within three years.

As for those who remain? Given that one-third of America’s fourth-graders are functionally illiterate — and our best-performing students rank 32nd in the world on the PISA test of international student achievement — the quality of teaching in our schools among those who attain tenure is abysmal. But doesn’t our teacher credentialing system help weed out laggards? Not at all. As Manhattan Institute scholar Marcus Winters and his team point out in a study of Florida teachers also released this week, there is no correlation between credentials — including certification and attaining graduate degrees, the two things education traditionalists tend to tout in their arguments over school reform — and student achievement. This confirms studies that have shown that credentials and experience account for only three-to-five percent of the student performance.

Yet we continue a system of teacher training and certification that all but ensures that low-quality teachers will continue their educational neglect and abuse on our children. As Winters notes, the pedagogical theories taught by ed schools have little positive impact on student achievement (and ultimately, teacher performance). Yet ed schools have not done anything to move from that emphasis to focusing on the things teachers need to have for success — subject-matter competency, entrepreneurial and leadership ability, instructional method, and the ability to analyze and use data in their work. Nor do they screen out ed school candidates for their subject-matter skills and care and empathy for children; the latter of which can be done simply by following Haberman’s suggested method of having an aspiring teacher show how he works with a child who looks different (and has a different socioeconomic background) than them.

Part of the problem lies with the fact that ed schools, like other institutions in traditional public education, are simply too stuck in their ways to change. The other problem is likely to be purely arbitrary. As Michigan Superintendent Mike Flanagan noted last month, far too many ed schools are focused on revenue instead of quality, and that is particularly clear in his state: Two-thirds of the Wolverine State’s 7,500 ed school grads leave the state, either to work in districts in other states, or perhaps to go into other fields. Savvy collegians may have figured out that getting a teaching degree is such easy work that they just go in, grab the degree, and then head into another field. For ed schools, which receive $7 billion annually for teacher training, tightening up standards (and improving teacher quality) could also mean sacrificing revenue.

But it’s not just the ed schools alone that are responsible. The fact that state teacher certification agencies, which oversee ed schools, are often separate from education departments means that ed schools are not well-scrutinized and regulated; the fact that the certification agencies themselves are also stuck in an old-school mindset (and, until recently, have been banned in nearly all states from even allowing for the use of value-added data in certification) is also a problem. The federal government has also neglected its role in this arena, failing to make ed school accountability an element of the No Child Left Behind Act when teaching (and how teachers get into classrooms) is a critical reason for the nation’s academic failure.

Then there are school districts and those who lead them. As Koedel notes in the AEI study, far too many principals are giving too many of their teachers high marks for performance — even when their ratings don’t correlate with actual classroom performance. The fact that many principals themselves aren’t exactly up to snuff in their performance is part of the problem; as Dropout Nation Contributing Editor Steve Peha has also pointed out in his series on school leadership (and I pointed out last week in my piece on the school data) these principals, often drawn from the teaching ranks, are often unsophisticated in areas such as data analysis and incapable of leading adults. As I noted in the 2008 report I co-wrote for the National Council on Teacher Quality, state laws (influenced by the lobbying of teachers’ union affiliates) have made it difficult and expensive for principals and superintendents to dismiss laggard teachers. But the laggard talent in the administrator ranks, along with the cultures they and incompetent teachers perpetuate, also make improving teacher quality a tough problem.

It will take plenty of work to solve the teacher training problem. And it may have to start with the end of ed schools. The fact that alternative teacher training programs such as Teach For America now account for four out of every ten teachers hired since 2005 means that ed schools are starting to lose their monopoly. But remember, many of those programs actually are started by ed schools themselves, which means that there are still plenty of laggard teachers coming into the field. We need more outfits of the likes of TFA, Urban Teacher Residency United, and Teach Plus, who stand outside of the ed school world, and can recruit and quickly train teachers at higher levels of quality and lower cost.

In fact, one can dare argue that there is almost no reason for ed schools to exist. After all, if an alternative teacher training outfit, a school district or even a teacher professional association in the guild mold, can recruit aspiring teachers, weed out the proverbial chaff from the wheat, and get those teacher up to speed during the first two years on the job, then ed schools can go out of business altogether. This is one idea the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation can fund and make a success in quick order. And definitely needs to do so: Our kids deserve better than what they are getting now.

On this week’s Dropout Nation Podcast, I discuss the two additional steps needed to help every child get the high-quality teachers they deserve. It isn’t enough to just address traditional teacher compensation, overhaul evaluations, and improve support for teachers already in the classroom. Additional steps must be taken not only to help our kids, but even elevate the teaching profession itself and attract talented collegians into the ranks.

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 the Los Angeles Times released it value-added analysis of teacher performance data based on student test scores(and the names of the teachers whose work was analyzed) last year, some school reformers, including American Enterprise Institute scholar Rick Hess, surprisingly joined education traditionalists in opposing the effort. Why? From his perspective, there’s no reason to make such data transparent, and that the data itself is too imperfect for public dissemination. As your Dropout Nation editor showed, Hess’ arguments didn’t stand up to scrutiny.

So it wasn’t surprising when Hess and others joined common cause  last week with the American Federation of Teachers’ New York City local to decry the New York State Appellate Division’s decision to allow the New York City Department of Education to release value-added data on individual teacher performance to media outlets and the public. And once again, the objections raised by Hess, other reformers who share his thinking, and education traditionalists, are off-target.

The first argument — that releasing the data serves no compelling public interest — is most-certainly off base. For taxpayers and for families who subsidize New York City’s public school system to the tune of $24 billion a year — most of it spent on teacher salaries and benefits — knowing how well teachers are performing in classrooms is certainly important. Releasing this data is essentially no different than disseminating salary data (which, as the husband of a former state government worker whose salary was exposed by the paper for which he had worked, I know how discomforting this can be). And given that school districts are government agencies accountable to taxpayers — and that New York State law doesn’t ban such release of data (and shouldn’t) — the decision by the Appellate Division is the right one.

For families, there is certainly a compelling interest for knowing the individual success of teachers in improving student performance. After all, they are finally learning what has been emerging as fact for some time: That the quality of a child’s education can vary from classroom to classroom. Even in the best-performing schools, traditional, charter or private, there are high-quality teachers working across the way from those who need help improving their instruction, and those who don’t need to be in classrooms at all. Contrary to what Hess and other foes of releasing teacher performance data may think, empowering parents and caregivers with this information can help them in making high-quality decisions for their families — and spur them to push for much-needed teacher quality reforms that will benefit all of our children.

If anything, releasing the data addresses one of the biggest problems in American public education: The fact that school data is largely a black box, with reporting mostly geared toward compliance instead of helping parents make smart educational decisions. For most parents, the data that is most-important for them is that about the teachers who instruct their kids every given day in the school year. By releasing this data, we finally get parents into important conversations about teacher quality that need to be had — and also take the next step in helping them attain their rightful roles as lead decision-makers in education.

Then there are the benefits of releasing this data for good-to-great teachers. For far too long, high-quality teachers have gone without the proper recognition — both in higher salaries and other rewards — for their success in the classroom. They never get the full recognition (or the wide range of compensation and career opportunities) they so richly deserve. Even worse, because we don’t recognize those teachers, they are often  forced by their colleagues to remain quiet about their achievements (or in the case of the John Taylor Gattos and Jaime Escalantes, forced out of the profession because of jealousy within the ranks).

Meanwhile they have had to serve alongside poor-performing teachers, who have lurked in the shadows, aided and abetted by teachers unions, administrators and colleagues who instinctively (if not quantitatively) knew better and did nothing. These teachers, who have gained near-lifetime employment (through tenure) just after three years on the job, are paid as much as $100,049 a year, and get nearly-free healthcare benefits and defined-benefit pensions, are a burden on taxpayers and colleagues alike. And because they help foster cultures of mediocrity in which only some children are considered capable of learning, they reap comfortable compensation at the expense of young boys and girls, many of whom will never enjoy the kind of middle-class salaries and strong job protections.

This isn’t to say that the data is perfect. But value-added analysis has stood up to three decades of scrutiny. As the work of Dan Goldhaber, Jonah Rockoff and others have shown, the data generally remains consistent over time. The arguments made by Hess, other reformers, and opponents of teacher quality reform against such uses are mere hogwash. The solution to the question of data quality is to improve the quality of data, not keep it from being released to the public. And to not use student test data in evaluating teachers, especially when it stands up to scrutiny, is just plain doing a disservice to families, teachers and children.

One can understand why AFT and National Education Association affiliates oppose releasing this data. After all, for them, it is the pursuit of perfection at the expense of the good of improving education for children, largely because the second goal is of secondary importance to them. As for Hess and other reformers who agree with this stance? This is a different story.

The unwillingness to support releasing such data proves one of the problems with some reformers: For all their talk of bold reform — including demanding the use of value-added teacher performance data in evaluations — they are unwilling to embrace it when the proverbial rubber meets the road. As a result, they are looked upon by other elements of the reform movement as being paper tigers, only interested in theoretical and policy discussions instead of real-world application of those ideas.

Releasing this teacher data is the right thing for everyone — and especially our children. Hess and other reformers opposed to the idea should be celebrating its release and developing ideas for improving the use of this data.

America’s education crisis cannot be solved if we don’t improve the quality of instruction in our schools. And this is as true for children in our suburban schools — where one out of every four fourth-graders are functionally illiterate — as it is for our poorest and minority kids in urban and rural communities. Yet the way we recruit, train and help teachers improve their skills is abysmal and shameful. The $7 billion a year on spent on training aspiring teachers is often wasted as far too many newly-minted teachers walk into classrooms ill-equipped for the work. And the problem starts with the nation’s university schools of education, which train nearly all of the 200,000 new teachers who enter classrooms.

Former Teachers College president Arthur Levine and longtime teaching guru Martin Haberman have long ago shown that ed schools do an abysmal job of recruiting aspiring teachers who have strong subject-matter competency, the strong entrepreneurial and self-starting drive to work in classrooms and the empathy and care for children needed to be successful in the classroom. As Levine noted in his 2006 study of ed school, 54 percent of teachers are trained at schools with low admissions requirements. And within the past two decades, evidence has shown that ed schools also do a terrible job of training teachers in reading and math instruction; far too many professors spend more time filling the heads of aspiring teachers with unproven theories on how to teach children — or in some cases, on the claptrap of Paulo Freire, whose pedagogy has almost nothing to do with education — than on training them how to help kids memorize, retain and build upon knowledge.

So it isn’t surprising that the National Council on Teacher Quality’s latest report on ed schools reveals that ed schools are doing a poor job in the final stage of teacher training: Providing aspiring teachers with work in actual classrooms needed to set them up for future success as full-time instructors.

While all of the ed schools surveyed by NCTQ required aspiring teachers to spend at least 10 weeks in classrooms, one out of every four of them didn’t require them to spend time with mentoring teachers and others handling all of the work teachers must do (including engaging parents) once they leave for full-time employment. Just one out of every three ed schools not aligning those student teaching courses with the schedules of the districts in which aspiring teachers are training; essentially, those training teachers miss out on the full experience of classroom instruction, including meeting students on the first day of school (the day when teachers must begin building important connections with the kids in their care). And with one out of every four ed schools allowing students to practice their teaching abroad or across country far away from local classrooms, far too many aspiring teachers aren’t getting the supervision they need to either stay on course or get additional tips for improvement.

Meanwhile ed schools and the researchers who work within them are doing little to actually determine the impact of student teaching on the achievement of students in care of apprenticing teachers. Just three of the 34 studies looking at the clinical development of aspiring teachers actually focus on outcomes. Essentially, ed schools and education researchers are turning blind eyes to the effectiveness of teacher training at the end stage.

Again, none of this is shocking. It is only this past November when the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education, which is supposed to oversee the quality of ed school offerings, finally offered up a report proposing that ed schools move away from their traditional training models to a medical school model that gets aspiring teachers into classrooms earlier. For most of the past decade, NCATE, the American Association for Colleges of Teacher Education and the ed schools they represent have spent more time criticizing school reformers, decrying the presence of alternative outfits such as Teach For America, and defending their shoddy offerings, than on improving the quality of their teacher training.

This isn’t just the fault of ed schools alone. State teacher credentialing agencies, which oversee ed schools, have done an abysmal job of overseeing ed schools and holding them accountable for ensuring that teachers are capable of improving student achievement. Just 39 states set minimum standards for student teaching programs, with only half of them requiring that aspiring teachers spend 10 weeks or more in the classroom. The fact that these agencies operate separately from education departments charged with overseeing schools is one more consequence of the mess that is education governance in most states; state education departments should oversee and regulate all aspects of elementary and secondary education systems. The federal government has also failed in holding ed schools and states accountable; the fact that ed schools are regulated through the Higher Education Act instead of the No Child Left Behind Act means that a critical part of American public education isn’t held accountable for student achievement.

School districts also haven’t helped solve this mess. Because they have spent little on developing robust data systems that can monitor student achievement and teacher performance means (and thanks to state laws that had banned the use of student test score data in teacher evaluations), districts haven’t been able to help those aspiring teachers by pairing them with good-to-great instructors who can show them the ropes. That the current system of teacher compensation doesn’t reward those high-quality teachers with opportunities to become master teachers or even start their own teacher training programs means that aspiring teachers are poorly trained, abysmally served, and, often, left to flounder.

The results of our abysmal teacher training system can be seen in the fact that half of all newly-hired teachers leave the profession within five years, not because they want to start programs to address the dropout crisis or to launch their own schools, but because they have not been properly prepared to teach (and, in many cases, probably shouldn’t have been allowed into ed schools in the first place). The consequences are evident in the low quality of instruction among those who have managed to gain tenure in three years in spite of their laggard performance. And, most importantly, the cost of shoddy teacher training can be seen every hour, when 150 teens drop out of school and into poverty and prison.

For the sake of children and teachers, this state of affairs cannot continue.

There are so many ways that traditional practices in American public education — many of which are tied to the traditional system of teacher compensation — shortchange poor and minority children. From seniority-based pay scales that only reward teachers for staying in place (and not for improving student achievement), to seniority-based rules on school assignment that restrict the ability of schools to keep high-quality teachers in place (and get rid of laggards), to even last in-first out layoff rules that force less-senior teachers out of classrooms without regard for performance, poor and minority kids constantly lose out.

In this presentation, University of Washington researcher Marguerite Roza — whose pioneering work on school spending has revealed many of these inequities — explains how the poorest and minority kids often get thrown to the back of the education bus. Watch, listen, consider and take action.