Last month, the Pope Center hosted an event that focused on the training of teachers (in education schools and elsewhere). John Chubb has just written a good piece on that topic. He contends many of today’s teachers “don’t even meet the academic standards set for their own students.”

That was the main point made by our keyn0te speaker, Sandra Stotsky, who argued that we’ll continue to have substandard teaching as long as education schools mainly draw students who are academically weak. The result is a downward spiral of academic achievement as poor teachers do a bad job of teaching, and then the many of the weakest of their students will go into teaching themselves.