Teacher Ed: No Longer 'Business as Usual'

One of our colleagues provided us with an article by David Ruenzel, called "Business as Usual," that appeared 20 years ago in Teacher Magazine (then a print periodical published byEducation Week's parent company). Mr. Ruenzel described the status of teacher education programs at Illinois State University—one of the country's oldest teacher education institutions—as "in the ideological mainstream." As faculty members now in the throes of helping to redesign its middle-level-education program, we found the article intriguing. In 1994, discussions of standards and high-stakes testing were just beginning, as more progressive movements (e.g., the middle school movement, multicultural education, and distance learning) had been a prominent part of educational discourse only for the previous few years.