Is there a role for teacher education to participate in preparing preservice teachers for an incentive environment?
DOMINIC BREWER from University of Southern California responds: What a great question! Undoubtedly, a sustainable system of incentives, positive and negative, should include teacher pre-service education. Although it’s anecdotal, my sense is that even after several years of standards-based accountability, many University teacher education programs continue to ignore the reality of accountability, let alone embracing it and helping teachers understand what it means to be data driven, for example. Undoubtedly there are some exceptions, but teacher education faculty are creatures of a pre-NCLB world, and very slow to change. There isnt an evidence-based culture so that ideologically dirven views of what works tend to have long lives. And it seems many have a hard time moving beyond the mantra that “measures are flawed” and therefore accoutnability should be rejected as a policy paradigm. Carefully considering what kinds of different or additional skills might be helpful in a positive-ince
