Anemona Hartocollis has a long piece on teacher education in the Education Section this Sunday. One curious aspect of the reforms discussed is the notion that student teachers should significantly increase their internship under closer univsersity supervision. It would seem to me that a longer internship makes sense, but why should the emphasis in supervision be the university? Hartocollis writes, "There is consensus that apprenticeship along the lines of medical school - students learn the science of medicine in the classroom, then practice it in a hospital, supervised by faculty doctors - is a better model than traditional student teaching." Labratory schools often have teachers in classrooms who are also faculty at the sponsoring university. That's the only similar situation. Is there another unstated reform here, whereby the university supervisors of student teachers would no longer be retired teachers now at university, but rather there would be supervisors who were faculty at both university and local school? I'm not sure this is neccessary, although I can see the appeal. Overall I would favor more high school-university connections. They are fundamentally disconnected now.

Another problem identified in the article is low teacher pay: "Among the historically intractable problems in retaining teachers are low status and low pay, says Anthony Carnevale, a senior fellow at the National Center on Education and the Economy. Because the public sector will never pay as much as the private, he says, and because unions have resisted extra pay for high-demand skills like math teaching, the gap in ability between teachers and other white-collar professionals will become bigger, not smaller."

However, I think the real reason for low teacher pay is identified by Warren Farrell in his book Why Men Earn More. His thesis revolves around the idea that pay is compensation. People don't need to be compensated for doing things that are themselves rewarding. Teaching is a very attractive job. It comes with all kinds of intrinsic rewards, from working with children, to the family friendly schedule, to its security. As such, there is a large pool of teacher hopefuls. And so with a large supply of potential teachers, pay is low. This can have consequences in terms of who considers teaching, but as long as the pool of hopefuls is large the pay must remain low. The problem, ultimatly is related to grade inflation. All of the pressures in the system conspire to keep standards low. As long as an increase in teacher qualifications does not induce parents to (or the broader community) to pay more for teachers, it is insensible to raise teacher pay. One of the problems of the public schools is that one customer's quality is not the next customer's, so that its hard to get the quality you want, and no one wants to pay for someone else's idea of quality. A free market in education might well solve this problem, after all college tuition, subject to market forces, continues to attract consumers despite rising costs.