My colleagues, Bob Maranto and Gary Ritter, along with former Teachers College president, Arthur Levine, have a piece in Education Week arguing that education schools could improve their quality as business schools did several decades ago. I suggest you read the article to judge their case for yourself.
What I wanted to do with this post is to anticipate the inevitable argument that business schools are somehow responsible for the recent economic meltdown or that ed schools are no more responsible for the quality of K-12 education than business schools are for the economic collapse. I’ve heard this line from a bunch of education officials, so it must be in the talking points.
Here’s why this type of argument is hogwash. Business schools are not responsible for the economic collapse because (among other reasons), biz schools do not work with business unions to get the government to require attendance at business schools and government certification before one can open (most) businesses. Some business people have attended business schools but most have not.
Ed schools, on the other hand, work with teacher unions to get the government to require that (most) educators receive training from ed schools and certification from the state before they can teach. The vast majority of educators, including the vast majority of teachers, principals, and superintendents have been trained and certified by ed schools.
I’m happy to let ed schools off the hook for K-12 performance if they actively lobby for ending their cartel on the production of new educators.
Jay P. Greene's Blog 
Jay-
I think the cartel reenforces 2 critical (but not good for the quality of education) things.
1) It keeps the emphasis on making sure that education providers by and large have the same belief system reenforced by the ed school. Independent knowledge makes any person less manageable.
2) The ed school cartels are mostly public so the state gets paid once to provide the education service and then gets more revenue from its control of who gets to teach.
Wow – imagine a world where edschool graduates from the top edschools made a LOT more money and actually had to produce for that increas. Imagine districts sending recruiters to the best ed schools to get the best graduates.
Should ed schools be closed down or should we just end the cartel arrangement?
Hi Patrick,
I would just end the cartel. There are some valuable things that many ed schools teach. Let people want to learn those valuable things because the job market voluntarily values people who have acquired those skills more highly. And the effect will be that more ed schools will teach even more valuable things.
And in response to rse — I’m not sure about your second point. The public (you and me) have to pay more for teachers because of the cartel. That’s a bad thing for us.
My 2nd point is that the cartel brings in additional revenue to the state that it would not otherwise necessarily receive.
It’s lucrative to act as the gatekeeper so they try to insist the cartel gives value to education and not just more money to the states through the ed schools.
Some states also are willing to push certain textbooks and an inquiry learning approach to math and science. If remediation is then needed, they provide that too.
They can thus also get paid for who gets to teach and then what and how it gets taught while the student just gets the one service: classroom time with a teacher.
An effective education system wouldn’t be nearly as big or lucrative.