Untaught teachers.

When I worked for the Peace Corps in the 1960s, one of our most shocking discoveries was how bad the teachers' colleges were. Roughly half of our volunteers had to be trained to teach overseas. But we found that most teacher training in this country paid only the most modest attention to the trainee's mastery of the subject he was to teach, and did not place nearly enough emphasis on practicing under the supervision of able and experienced teachers.

It was therefore depressing in the extreme for me to read in an article this fall by Jay Mathews of The Washington Post that both shortcomings are still true of teacher education today. Why have 40 years gone by with so little improvement? I suspect it has to do with the power the education lobby has in state legislatures and with the fact that teacher education on the cheap is a moneymaker for universities.

Good teacher education is much more urgent now than it was in the old days, when we could count on a supply of brilliant women who had few job opportunities and were bright enough to overcome the miserable education they received at teachers' college.