Terry is right. Art Levine’s analysis doesn’t go deep enough.
He says that law schools do a good job because they take a fairly uniform approach, whereas ed schools are “chaotic” and therefore they don’t.
That’s not the problem.
If most lawyers are pretty good, it isn’t because law schools are so splendid. In fact, legal education is largely irrelevant to how well one does in practice. That’s because nearly everything a lawyer needs to know about his specialty field is learned after graduation. The reason why most lawyers are pretty good is that they must, for the most part, face competition. Competition to survive the quest to make partner; competition to best rivals in cases; competition to get and satisfactorily serve clients.
That element of competition is what is missing from the teaching profession, especially where (as is typical in public schools), there is iron-clad union job protection. The training for many teachers is poor, steeped in “progressive” notions about multiple-intelligences, learning styles, student-centered classrooms and so on, but if teachers really had to produce results on the job, they would quickly forget about all that stuff once they got on the job.
Returning to law schools for a moment, at the current time, in most states, going through an ABA accredited law school is the only way to get into the legal profession. Similarly, for the most part the only avenue into public school teaching is by getting an ed school degree. There is no reason why either law schools or ed schools should be given a monopoly on the preparation for entry into their respective fields.
I applaud Levine for taking the stance that education schools are not ideal, but the optimal reform is to allow individuals who want to teach options besides going through education school.
