I’ve always thought that the biggest problem with teacher education is that prospective teachers spend too much time listening to professors talk about pedagogical theory and not enough time learning their core subjects. In other words, a lot of students who go on to become 10th-grade history professors actually take fewer history courses than ordinary history majors.

This isn’t precisely the problem Secretary of Education Arne Duncan took on this week in a speech at Columbia’s Teachers College, but he was strongly critical of the way our country prepares teachers:

Yet, by almost any standard, many if not most of the nation’s 1,450 schools, colleges, and departments of education are doing a mediocre job of preparing teachers for the realities of the 21st century classroom. … For decades, schools of education have been renowned for being cash cows for universities. The large enrollment in education schools and their relatively low overhead have made them profit-centers. But many universities have diverted those profits to more prestigious but under-enrolled graduate departments like physics—while doing little to invest in rigorous educational research and well-run clinical training.

Wow.