During the last few years, The New Schools Venture Fund (NSVF), a major private funder of K-12 charter schools, has been intensely involved in creating and promoting a bill (the GREAT Act) in the U.S. Congress, The Washington Post reports. This bill, if passed, would lead to the establishment of teacher and principal preparation programs that would not be subject to the same level of accountability as other state-approved programs. The bill is a part of a broader movement to disrupt the current system of college and university teacher education and replace it with deregulation, competition, and a market economy. There is a need for greater transparency of these private efforts to influence public policy in teacher education so that the consequences of the proposed legislation can be more clearly understood, discussed, and debated. Discussion and debate of public policy issues are cornerstones of a healthy democratic society. There is reason to believe that the adoption of the GREAT Act would only worsen the current inequitable distribution of teachers where the least prepared and least experienced teachers are often assigned to teach our most vulnerable students…
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