Examines Wisconsin teachers' perceived competencies in, attitudes toward, and amount of class time devoted to teaching about the environment. Discusses the effects of Wisconsin environmental education mandates concerning preservice preparation in environmental education and K-12 environmental education curriculum plans. Identifies areas where the…

Discusses how members of the Iowa Legislature, the Iowa State Department of Education, and the Iowa Association of Colleges of Teacher Education have been in heated conversation in the last year about the legislature's push to institute teacher testing as a way of improving the quality of Iowa's teaching force. (SG)

Special education teachers in today's workplace must show "competence at teaching everything" (Mastropieri, 2001). They work in different settings, teaching and adapting content across all levels. Added to this complexity are reform efforts that are driving major changes in the entire special education system, including service delivery models and…

The No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act of 2001 emphasizes school accountability, including consequences for perceived school failure, and NCLB consistently equates educational success with high student standardized test scores. I argue that NCLB may produce unacceptably high levels of collateral damage, and that teacher educators have special reasons…

NCLB's emphasis on seeing to it that all classrooms are staffed by highly qualified teachers is commendable. Teacher competence is the most important factor in student learning. The ability to define that competence had been gradually emerging from research and policy making before NCLB, but the law, unfortunately, is loosening its grasp on a…

This article examines efforts by organizations and states to describe the competencies of a parent educator, to explain what parent educators teach parents through parent education, and to show how that informs parent educator competencies. It summarizes examples of certification, licensure, and other accountability programs, and identifies the…

In this article, the author describes what it takes to become a good teacher and what the system could do to develop good teachers. The author explains that good teachers chronicle their years by the number of flawed programs survived. The author notes that good teachers need to learn self-reliance. To achieve this, they need breathing room, and…

When STARS reform efforts were launched in 2000, teacher training in assessment was seen as crucial to the success of the program. The STARS reform efforts focus on both supporting the implementation of quality classroom assessment practices and implementing a district-based accountability system. The training programs described in this article…

The recent turn in teacher education reform in the United States toward hyper "professionalization" and assessment-based accreditation, spearheaded by the largest accrediting agency, the National Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE), has moved beyond codifying knowledge and skills to codifying the internal existence of those…

In this study, I examined the validity of a performance-based, subject-specific teacher evaluation system by analyzing the relationship between teacher evaluation scores and student achievement. From a policy perspective, establishing validity was important because it is embedded in a knowledge-and skills-based pay system, which attached high…

Discusses National Board for Professional Teaching Standards certification, examining five problematic issues: lack of agreement on criteria for assessing teacher performance, slender evidentiary basis for assessment, the board's inability to authenticate or verify the accuracy of the materials received, secrecy surrounding the board's…

This essay discusses the author's encounter with PRAXIS II test preparation questions that distort and misrepresent complex reading processes. Three sample test items are presented and discussed.

The National Health Educator Competencies Update Project (CUP), conducted during 1998-2004, addressed what health educators currently do in practice, the degree to which the role definition of the entry-level health educator is still up-to-date, and the validation of advanced-level competencies. A 19-page questionnaire was sent to a representative…

The aim of this study is to examine whether the education of dance teachers at the Departments of Physical Education and Sport Sciences (DPESS), and their background of knowledge, meets the requirements of traditional Greek dance performance by dancing groups. The study was based mainly on bibliographical research about the stage performance of…

The South African government has made significant efforts to overcome the legacy of apartheid education, committing itself to the dual goals of achieving high-quality education with more equitable access for all South Africans. Substantial investments have been made to achieve this vision, however, translating policies into improved school-level…