Teacher education -- the professional preparation of elementary and secondary school teachers -- has been a neglected enterprise, long suffering from status deprivation. As the field's host institutions made the transition over the decades from normal schools to teachers colleges to state colleges to state universities, some colleges of education found it prudent to downplay their teacher-education role and sought status through identification with the research criteria of the arts and sciences. Many dropped pre-service, undergraduate teacher preparation and moved entirely to graduate status.

In fact, most of today's top-ranked schools of education prepare only a handful of beginning teachers or none at all. Since each of these schools is housed in a major, research-oriented university, an observer might conclude that there is no dwelling place for teacher education in the most prestigious mansions of higher education.

My primary assumption in what follows is that higher education has a moral responsibility to provide leadership in ensuring well-educated teachers for U.S. schools. Deliberately eschewing teacher education rather than elevating it to a position of high priority confers shame, not prestige.

Suddenly, however, teacher education has been rediscovered in policy circles and linked significantly to school reform. Fifteen years of public attention to school reform has now expanded to include higher education and the teacher education function traditionally attached to it. The stances institutions can take in the domain of teacher education are narrowing down to just three, the first of which is probably untenable: opt out, comply with state regulations, or assume moral and programmatic leadership.

There exists today in the United States an unusual educational improvement initiative called the National Network for Educational Renewal (NNER). Its agenda -- the Agenda for Education in a Democracy -- guides the efforts of educators in 33 colleges and universities, over 100 school districts, and more than 500 schools joined in partnership for the simultaneous renewal of schooling and the education of educators. Three of these school-college partnerships educate more than half the teachers produced in their respective states, in programs quite different from those in place just a few years ago.

One of the remarkable features of NNER is that key leaders at all levels made a voluntary choice. NNER participants are doing what they are doing for the best of reasons: they want to, stirred by two major stimulants -- a growing body of evidence regarding teacher education as a neglected enterprise, and an agenda of challenging intellectual substance and moral grounding.

The Agenda for Education in a Democracy -- which grew out of two inquiries of mine, conducted with colleagues, into the nature of schooling and school change -- has three parts: mission, conditions necessary to the mission and strategies for implementation. They present a daunting challenge.

The four-part mission sets for teachers and teacher-educators: enculturation of the school-age population in a social and political democracy, comprehensive introduction of the young to the human conversation, the exercise of caring pedagogy, and the moral stewardship of schools and teacher education programs. The necessary conditions to be established for the conduct of this mission number at least 60. And the strategies call for symbiotic partnerships between schools and institutions of higher education. The latter is expected to bring to the collaboration professors from both colleges of education and departments of the arts and sciences.

Intensive immersion of key actors in the agenda through a year-long leadership program, an annual meeting of participants, site-to-site networking and full use of the wonders of modern electronic communications has produced the psychic energy and synergy necessary to individual and institutional renewal. Lacking the common agenda, it is unlikely that the three long-separated cultures -- teacher education, the arts and sciences, and the schools -- each with a piece of the curriculum, would have come together in partnership to put the programmatic pieces together in a reasonably coherent, mission-driven whole.

In terms of preparing teachers for their careers, questions arise. Assuming that we want all teachers to be both well-educated citizens and well prepared in the subject matters of their teaching, do present curricular offerings and student advisement ensure such outcomes? Assuming that teachers require grounding in certain subject matters in order to advance the public mission of schooling in our democracy, how is that outcome to be ensured? Assuming that future teachers need to learn certain subject matters twice -- once for themselves and once more for the teaching of children or adolescents -- are the provisions for such deep learning adequate? And given our increased understanding of the pedagogy required to deal with a diverse school population, is it reasonable to assume that a well-educated teacher versed in the relevant subject maters and pedagogy requires only four years of higher education? In that light, today, a campus-wide response to these questions is imperative for any college or university that wants to prepare teachers for elementary and secondary schools.

There is now a sizable domain of fundamental agreement on what needs to be done if teacher education is to become a robust enterprise. The major elements of this agreement are rapidly becoming part of the conventional wisdom regarding the improvement of this subject area. They include the necessity for school-university partnering, for the regular commitment and involvement of faculty members in the arts and sciences, for partner or professional schools serving as "teaching" institutions, and for these schools and university-based teacher education to renew together. There is also considerable agreement about the need for top-level leadership in both higher education and the pre-university school system to elevate teacher education as a priority. Furthermore, there is a growing commitment to increasing field experiences in the curriculum and to integrating university- and school-base activities into a coherent whole. Not quite as widely articulated is considerable agreement on the need for top-level leadership in both higher education and the pre-university school system to elevate teacher education as a priority.

To be sure, these agreements are fraught with difficulties, including the cultural differences between professional schools and universities. In addition, school administrators and faculty are under increasing pressures these days from parents responding anxiously to calls for school reform, and from the reform proposals themselves. Greater involvement in teacher education, in that light, is readily perceived as an additional burden.

And yet, the National Commission on Teaching & America's Future has set as a goal a qualified, caring, competent teacher for every child in the United States by the year 2006. It should be taken as a challenge toward which we should work.

There are two reasons for institutions of higher education to join with partner schools in picking up that challenge. First, from a practical standpoint, mere token compliance is likely to be viewed negatively by state policy-makers -- with implications in state appropriations. Second, in moral terms, exerting leadership in designing programs that will attract and produce superb teachers for the nation's schools is simply the right thing to do.

In the minds of many would-be reformers, teacher education is in the quick-fix category. But a more thoughtful inquiry into the history of teacher education, its neglect in the emergence of the American university, and the recommendations for major change now gaining attention provides some potentially useful lessons to guide institutions committed to major improvement.

First, there must be a symbiotic partnership between colleges and universities to pursue a common mission, with both engaged in renewal.

Second, the time and work involved in creating and maintaining this partnership for simultaneous renewal necessitates a continuous relationship somewhat akin to that between a medical school and a hospital, except that in that case, several "teaching" schools are needed.

Third, the more collaborative schools and universities become, and the more they recognize their need for one another in seeking better teachers and better schools, the more troublesome the mechanics of management will become. This will call for imaginative leadership in the creation of new organizational arrangements and perhaps new settings -- such as a recommended center of pedagogy -- to handle a budget for the whole of teacher education, determine governmental procedures, select partner schools, ensure curricular renewal, and much more.

Fourth, whether it is adapted from elsewhere or created anew, there must be a clear and common agenda of mission, conditions to be put in place, and designated roles for the three groups of major participants. Given these necessary components, the agenda will be complex and, consequently, a continuing source of conversation regarding the meanings and implications of the messages it contains.

Fifth, the tenure of designated leaders in schools, school districts, colleges and universities is markedly shorter than it was even a dozen years ago. Consequently, change dependent on just a few such individuals is hazardous. The message: Leadership must be widely shared, which in turn means that preparation for leadership must be a built-in, continuing activity.

The sixth lesson is directed specifically to the top leadership of colleges and universities. Top-level campus administrators must take the lead in articulating changing expectations. Furthermore, given the degree to which external pressures, to be successfully met, call for responses that transcend the schools, colleges and departments of education to embrace the arts and sciences in particular, the leadership responsibility cannot successfully be delegated to the dean of education. Nor can it be assumed successfully by the central administration in the absence of serious effort to learn enough about teacher education to make wise decisions.

A campus-by-campus perspective on higher education reveals the extent to which progress has been uneven. Rarely have there been sufficient resources to develop the whole at once. And so, the primary effort in one era has been directed to medicine, in another to law, in another to engineering and in still another to business.

The time is long overdue to address an era of concentrated attention to teacher education. The reasons are both practical and moral: practical because the conditions of future survival are at stake; moral because it is the right thing to do.

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John I. Goodlad, former dean of the Graduate School of Education at the University of California at Los Angeles, is co-director of the Center for Educational Renewal at the University of Washington and president of the Institute for Educational Inquiry, in Seattle. This article was abridged with permission from the Fall 1999 issue of National CrossTalk, a publication of the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education. Copyright © 1999 the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education.

The opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the U.S. Government.