Part IV
Global Education Reform and Teacher
Education
Introduction
The nature, quality and effectiveness of teacher preparation increasingly have
become a central focus for education policy worldwide in afiercely argued debate
among governments, think tanks, world policy agencies, education researchers and
teacher organisations (see bibliography). Teacher education issues have taken on a
special urgency for several reasons: the quality of teachers is widely perceived to be
“the single most important school variable influencing student achievement”
(OCED 2005: 2) and also claimed to be in part responsible for America’s educa-
tional decline (NCTQ 2013) especially in a time of transition from industrial to
information economy (Levine 2006, 2007); governments around the world under
the influence of neoliberal policies have imposed market-based performance-
oriented systems; a global reform movement has led to standardisation, greater
managerialism and test-based accountability (Childs and Menter 2013);
university-based teacher education is currently challenged by other models, many
of which advocate for shorter or school-based training; edu-businesses and private
sector interests alleged“producer capture”by teachers and increasingly seek to
establish for-profit and not-for-profit schools and training programs; new clinical
models based on the“practicum turn”have encouraged a shift in professional
preparation from universities to a closer partnership with schools; there have been
strong attacks on the quality of university-based teacher education programmes and
on the professionalism of teachers; there have been systematic and ongoing doubts
cast on the nature of the relationship between education theory and classroom
practice; the“generic”teacher education model has been questioned in the face of
increasingly diverse, ethnic, and especially urban, school populations (Hammerness
and Axelrod 2013) with the attendant demand for“Context-Specific” Teacher
Preparation.
There has been little sustained, long-term or systematic research to provide
empirical support for the broad aspects of teacher education policy largely because
such research has been chronically underfunded and based on traditional