Elizabeth Stringer Keefe

In the United States, “accountability” has been used as a lever of reform to “fix” what is sometimes referred to as a “broken” and “failing” education system, reform rhetoric that undergirds a searing impression of mediocrity in US schools, teachers and the teacher educators, and the teacher education programs that produce them. This rhetoric has given birth to a controversial phenomenon—the relocation of traditional teacher preparation away from colleges and universities to “new graduate schools of education” (nGSEs), which situate themselves as competitors of university-based teacher preparation. nGSEs are not university-based, but are approved as institutions of higher education to prepare teachers, endorse them for certification/licensure, and grant master’s degrees. This chapter locates the impact and influence of nGSEs within the rapidly changing landscape of US teacher preparation; the context within which they emerged; and the shifting political, policy, and professional contexts that contributed to both the rise and fall of nGSEs.

Progressive neoliberal teacher education attempts to reconcile neoliberal and social justice reforms through the design and implementation of new programs. Social justice teacher education advocates have argued that neoliberal policies by definition foreclose the opportunity to work toward emancipatory social justice ends. In this chapter we present an analysis of progressive neoliberal teacher education at the Sposato Graduate School of Education (GSE), a teacher preparation program that grew from Match Education, a Massachusetts charter management organization. Informed by theoretical perspectives about teacher education policy and reform, we analyze Sposato GSE's explicitly progressive neoliberal curricular design in relation to the experiences of program participants and leaders. We argue in this chapter that while progressive neoliberal teacher education programs do make intentional space for social justice in their program design, the result is often partial and incomplete. We conclude that the issue may not be progressive neoliberal or social justice teacher education programs as such, but rather the limitations placed on programs that keep the focus primarily on teacher education perspectives instead of more authentic social transformation.

This article takes a multi-case perspective on teacher preparation at new graduate schools of education (nGSEs) across four sites. The article argues that teacher preparation at nGSEs is a study in contrasts. On one hand, nGSE leaders frame teacher preparation at their institutions in terms of the marked contrasts they perceive between their programs and teacher preparation programs at universities, which is one of their principal justifications for the relocation of teacher preparation to new non-university organizations. On the other hand, there are stark contrasts within and across nGSE sites in how teacher preparation is conceptualized and enacted, depending primarily upon the interplay of underlying assumptions and values and the larger professional and political purposes to which particular nGSEs are attached.

A controversial innovation within the field of teacher education is the relocation of teacher preparation to new graduate schools of education (nGSEs). nGSEs are state-authorized institutions of higher education that prepares teachers, endorse candidates for teacher licensure, and grant master’s degrees, yet are not university-based. This paper offers a profile of the Charles Sposato Graduate School of Education, an nGSE which emerged from the education reform organization Match Education. Sposato’s intensive context-specific model, which employs hyper-prescriptive training, extensive cycles of practice, and “expert” coaching on precise techniques, was aimed at establishing automaticity in the “rookie” teacher. Sposato’s emergence as an nGSE was an attempt to answer to education reform quality debates that demanded that teacher quality be primarily defined by teacher effectiveness.

Most of today’s reforms of initial teacher education programs, policies, and practices have positioned teachers and teacher educators as the objects, rather than the agents of reform. In contrast, this article focuses on teacher educators as reformers by analyzing three approaches to reform that are initiated, developed, and promoted by teacher educators themselves: entrepreneurial reform, managerial reform, and democratic reform. The article concentrates primarily on teacher educators as reformers in the US, but also includes examples from other countries. For each approach, the article considers: who the teacher educator reformers are and how they are positioned; how they construct the 'problem' of teacher education; what reforms they advocate as the 'solution'; and, how these are related to larger policy and political agendas. The article argues that this kind of analysis is critical to understanding the current discourse of reform and the competing agendas that dominate the politics of teacher education.