25.4 English Exceptionalism?
To date, the dominant orthodoxy described at the beginning of this chapter con-
tinues to hold sway in much of the world. However, some of the trends described
here for England are beginning to emerge elsewhere in local form, suggesting that
marketization or deregulation may be more than just an English or even just a New
Right approach to teacher education.
Alternative routes have long been a feature of the teacher preparation landscape
in the USA. After 1999, the number of US teachers licensed through these routes
climbed steadily, so that by 2005 about one-third of all new teachers entered
through such routes. Teach for America (the inspiration if not the model for Teach
First in England) is now the major provider of new teachers in some US States.
When he was Federal Education Secretary in Barak Obama’s Democratic admin-
istration, Arne Duncan commented that teachers deserved better support and
training than mainstream teachers colleges today provide. One of the strongest US
examples of branded professionalism, the New York-based Relay Graduate School
of Education, a collaboration by three Charter Management Organizations (the
equivalent of English Academy Chains), explicitly positions itself as a response to
‘a nationwide failure by most university-based teacher education programmes to
prepare teachers for the realities of the twentyfirst century classroom’(Relay GSE
publicity 2013).
The marketization of teacher preparation in the USA is certainly accelerating
(Arnett 2015 ). In many cases, new routes can opt out of the mandates that govern
traditional university-based provision. So far, though, deregulation has been less
significant in the US than in England, not least because Charter Schools (the
equivalent of English Free Schools and Academies) make up a much lower pro-
portion of school provision and, in most States, they remain more subject to gov-
ernment regulation. Nevertheless, in 2015, a more radical proposal to deregulate
entry to teaching was proposed by Scott Walker, the Republican Governor of
Wisconsin, although it eventually had to be watered down in response to wide-
spread public opposition.
25.5 Hybrid Systems
The reality in many countries is however likely to be the creation of hybrid systems
with varying degrees of both marketization and central regulation. Many countries
still conform to a model where schools and teachers appear to have been‘em-
powered’to develop their own‘local’professionalisms, but centrally specified
competences and standards mean that local professional freedom is actually quite
tightly constrained by the demands of the‘evaluative state’(Whitty 2000 ).
25 The Marketization of Teacher Education: Threat or Opportunity? 379