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A Flexner Report on Teacher Preparation

This post first appeared on Brookings.edu.

Abraham Flexner transformed American medical training with his 1910 report, “Medical Education in the United States and Canada.”  His chief recommendations—higher admission standards, two years of laboratory training, two years of clinical training in a hospital setting—left an imprint which is still visible a century later.

However, the landscape of medical education at the beginning of the last century was very different from the state of teacher preparation today.  Many university-based medical schools were already combining laboratory training with clinical training in an affiliated hospital.  The American Medical Association had been championing such a model before 1910.  By personally visiting all the medical schools in the country, Flexner documented conditions in schools which were not using that model (for instance, identifying those still teaching students homeopathic medicine and flagging those with grossly inadequate laboratory facilities.)  The Flexner report did indeed transform medical education—but not by persuading schools to change.  Rather, the report created pressure on state licensing agencies to close the medical schools which were teaching outdated theories or providing inadequate facilities.  In 1910, there were 155 M.D. granting institutions, with more than 25,000 students.  By 1935, there were 66 schools (and about half as many medical students as before).

In teacher preparation, there are no model programs (at least none that are broadly recognized).  A modern day Flexner report on teacher preparation would first need to provide the evidence for a new model.

Three types of changes are needed.  The first is higher admission standards. When it comes to improving teacher education, raising admission barriers is tempting, because it’s politically expedient and not complex to implement.  However, raising admission standards can be costly in other ways, by eliminating from the pipeline anyone who could be discovered as effective later.  If we had mechanisms to identify effective teachers in the initial years of teaching (or during training), it would be counter-productive to screen out during admissions.  Therefore, we need to be confident that substantially higher admission standards will yield a substantially more effective pool of candidates. ...

To read the complete blog post, please visit Brookings.edu.

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