Teachers Colleges, Now and Then

My new Chronicle of Higher Education column focuses on a group of higher education institutions that usually don’t receive a lot of attention: the 180 or so regional public universities that were founded, often in the 19th century, as “normal schools” to train teachers. Over time, they’ve all followed the same pattern, first becoming “Teachers Colleges,” then dropping the “Teachers,” then trading the “College” for “University.” Now they have, or are trying to get, all the trappings of a research university: multiple colleges and academic departments, stadiums named after corporate sponsors, $20 million gymnasiums–sorry, “Integrated Wellness Centers”–and so forth.

The problem is that they’re not actually research universities. Most of them don’t train graduate students in significant number or conduct much funded research. So they’ve adopted the most expensive and student-indifferent organizational model available even though many of them are still responsible for what they were founded to do: training the state’s teachers. This makes them low-hanging fruit for future disruptive innovation.

One of the reasons people don’t pay more attention to this is that there are few concrete alternatives for comparison. But that’s starting to change. In late 2009 I wrote about Teacher U, an innovative teacher training institute founded by several high-profile charter school management organizations in New York City. Last week, Teacher U announced that, with the full approval of state officials, it is evolving into the Relay School of Education:

Relay School of Education will operate separately from traditional institutions of higher learning and require that master’s degree candidates demonstrate proof of student achievement in their classrooms. These candidates will also benefit from the experience of the three high-performing charter school networks – KIPP, Uncommon Schools, and Achievement First –that originally created Teacher U.

“Operate separately from traditional institutions of higher learning.” “Demonstrate proof of student achievement.” People who think that traditional institutions can keep operating their cash-cow schools of education with only incremental improvements, forever, should think long and hard about those phrases. Normal schools have drifted so far from their original mission that people are now going back to the beginning and founding actual teacher training institutes from scratch. And I’m willing to bet that nobody at the Relay School of Education is planning on spending $20 million to build a gym.