Document Number: 10981World Class Standards for Preparing Teachers of Mathematics - While the United States has some great teacher preparation programs, the worst ones produce more than 60% of the nation's future middle school math teachers. The variation is so great, standards for teacher preparation need to be imposed. After analyzing data from 23,000 future teachers in 17 countries, William Schmidt and colleagues found there were nine core courses consistently taken by high-achieving middle school teachers and identified a similar set of coursework in math and math teaching methods for future elementary school teachers. One in seven U.S. future middle school teachers and slightly more than half of future elementary teacher had taken the benchmark courses. These poorly-prepared math teachers tend to wind up in schools serving a high percentage of students in poverty. (William Schmidt, Nathan Burroughs and Leland Cogan, Michigan State University, October 2013)...