Project Summary

There’s a growing consensus worldwide that teacher quality is among the most important factors in student achievement and the quality of education systems. However, there is controversy about how teachers should be prepared. Since 2005, eleven new graduate schools of education (nGSEs) have emerged. nGSEs are state-authorized to grant master’s degrees and endorse teachers for initial certification but are not connected to universities. This study takes an in-depth look at how candidates learn to teach at nGSEs and how these new organizations have challenged the field of teacher preparation.

Approach

Unlike related projects, which use publicly available documents and materials, this study featured unprecedented access to program activities, participants, and proprietary materials. This study is informed by two complimentary theoretical frameworks: learning to teach in communities of practice and new organizational institutionalism. The first approach allows the team to study how nGSEs conceptualize and enact teacher preparation; the second framework focuses on nGSEs’ organizational features and situates them within the market-driven policy landscape shaping the wider field of teacher preparation. .

Key Findings

• nGSEs have highly specialized missions that reflect both the impact of market-based policies and their membership in powerful ideational and financial networks. 

• With the support of reform-oriented philanthropies, nGSEs have created alternative funding models for institutions of higher education. 

• All nGSEs have sharply-focused, but dramatically different, visions of good teaching that are closely coupled with enactment, making for unusual program coherence.

• Although most nGSEs are designed to prepare teachers for urban schools, they, in fact, socialize teachers into very different communities of practice.

• nGSEs have invented unique design components and utilize parallel pedagogies in teacher candidate coursework, whereby candidates are taught the way they are expected to engage K-12 students.