The New York TImes' blog, Room for Debate, poses the question, "Do Teachers Need Education Degrees?" Blog editors seek responses from a variety of experts, from teachers to principals to education school deans.
Jeffrey Mirel, the David L. Angus Collegiate Chair of education and professor of history at University of Michigan, writes,
Teaching is an incredibly complex and difficult enterprise. Little about the job comes to people naturally. Prospective teachers need to learn such mundane but crucial skills as how to keep their classrooms orderly and centered on the topics at hand. Most important, at the same time, they have to learn how to make the subject matter of their content area accessible and worth knowing for their students, no easy task given the increasingly diverse backgrounds of these students. When ed schools are doing their job these are the kinds of things prospective teachers learn so can they start their careers better able to handle the intense and unrelenting demands of teaching.
But Martin Kozloff, a professor of education at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, writes,
a master's degree in most education subfields further stamps in the "progressive," "child-centered," "constructivist," "developmentally appropriate," postmodernist, pseudo-liberationist baloney that infects the undergraduate curriculum, and which leaves graduating ed students unprepared to provide their own students with coherent, logically sequenced instruction.