“Teaching is the profession that teaches all other professions,” it is often said. This raises the question: Who teaches teachers to be teachers? Prospective teachers start with classroom courses and then gain hands-on experience through shadowing a working teacher and assisting in or teaching a class.

However, a study released on July 21st by the National Council on Teacher Quality questions the effectiveness of current student teaching programs. This Council will publish letter grades for teaching schools in U.S. News and World Report, with student teacher program effectiveness counting for one-fifth or one-third of the overall grade.

The council’s report “Student Teaching in the United States” found that three-quarters of 134 domestic student teaching programs did not meet five basic requirements. “Many people would say student teaching is the most important piece of teacher preparation, but the field is really barren in the area of standards. The basic accrediting body doesn’t even have a standard for how long a student teacher needs to be in the classroom. And most of the institutions we reviewed do not do enough to screen the quality of the cooperating teacher the student will work with,” said Kate Walsh, president of the Council, in an interview with The New York Times.

The report found that only 3/25 of teachers “in any given school [are] likely to have the three qualifications necessary to serve as a mentor to a student teacher” and that only 1/25 are “both qualified and willing to take on the role of mentor teacher.” Further exacerbating the issue, 43% of institutions have “no criterion for the selection of mentor teachers other than some teaching experience,” while only 14% of institutions require “that mentor teachers are fully qualified.”

So where do we go from here? Teacher preparation programs must begin to select exemplary mentor teachers, holding themselves to standards during the selection process. The report recommends that all mentor teachers have at least three years of experience, the ability to work well with adults and “highly effective” performance. So far, “Florida is the only state that explicitly requires that student performance be considered when assessing whether a teacher is qualified to be a cooperating teacher.”

After these changes are made, prospective teachers should start looking to alternative certification programs, which involve more hands-on classroom training. While student teaching is at the moment flawed, alternative programs, that often use student teaching among other strategies, are the way forward. Thus student teaching must be fixed.

A report by the National Center for Education Information finds that these alternative certification programs are thriving. Since 2005 40% of teachers have gained certification through an alternative program, compared to 22% between 2002 and 2004 and 8% in the 1990’s.

These teachers show “striking differences … in attitudes concerning current proposed school reform measures and ways to strengthen teaching as a profession,” according to Emily Feistritzer, the author of the report. The report found that 53% of alternate route teachers believe that abolishing tenure would improve education, compared to only 31% of traditional route teachers. An opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal quoted the report, saying,“ Sixty percent of alternate route teachers and 43% of their traditional route colleagues think that students should pass standardized tests for grade promotion. And ‘nearly two thirds (62%) of alternate route teachers think that expanding the use of charter schools for children in low performing public schools would improve American education.’ Only 41% of traditional route instructors agree.”

Who teaches teachers to be teachers? At the moment not whom we would like. Student teaching programs do not work in their current form; however, student teaching is vital to the training of new teachers, so we should not shy away from improving student teaching programs. Rather we must set standards and a selection process for mentor teachers, because student teaching driven alternative programs are the way forward. Alternative programs are the future of educating our educators because they create teachers who are willing and able to make tough decisions and put the students first. They are the kind of teachers who I’d like teaching me to become a doctor, lawyer or maybe even a teacher someday.