A bill recently introduced in Congress, the GREAT Teachers and Principals Act [1], would designate programs based outside of universities as special academies for preparing teachers and principals, says Arthur Levine, president of the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation and former president of Teachers College, Columbia University. This misses the fundamental problem: a number of the nation’s teacher education programs are failing. It makes more sense to close the weak programs than to pay to create bandaids over them…