Teacher Education Curriculum, Preservice

Criticism of the established curriculum of undergraduate preparation of teachers began in the 1950s. Critics accused teacher educators of supporting a watered-down college academic curriculum resulting in insufficiently responsive schools to the educational needs of gifted and talented students. It was widely believed that U.S. children lagged behind their Soviet counterparts. Events of the 1960s lead to more criticism, but the charge was irrelevancy, particularly that the school curriculum was unresponsive to the needs of urban and minority children. Since that time, wave after wave of educational reform has followed, and with time, state and federal governments have become the dominant forces in curriculum reform within both public education and teacher education. This trend accelerated following publication in 1983 of A Nation at Risk: The ...