Thought Experiment

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There have been some comments suggesting Ed Schools are pointless. Okay. Suppose you eliminate them today. How would that improve schools?

UPDATE: Some have said that closing Ed Schools would improve the pool of teacher candidates. What evidence is there for that conclusion? It might be very correct. I just want to know.

Just for the record, new teachers entering the field are 22 or maybe 23 years old. They know what they know....and we cannot expect them to have the life experience or wisdom of an older person.

So what should we do to make sure the 23-year-old who is about to take over your child's classroom is capable?

UPDATE: I spent the morning trying to find evidence that showed that teacher ed students are less intelligent than other students. I can't find any. I have found a lot of evidence about teacher "behaviors" that negatively impact student achievement. I've also found a cite in the renowned Coleman Report of 1965, that teachers who scored better on a short vocabulary test had better student outcomes. But that's it.

We need more than just anecdotal evidence ("someone told me that....") to talk about this. I have my own anecdote. The re SAT and ACT scores of students are my Ed School fall into the same range as students in all the other schools (literature, science and arts, business, social work, etc.). But the mean is slightly lower, meaning that there are more than 50 percent of students in the bottom half of the bell curve. They are not, however, all ganged up at the very bottom.