Teachers say:
"We need help with classroom management:
discipline problems, effective classroom rules, procedures, handling students who don't do the homework, who call out, curse, come in late, fight, throw things, and attack us."

The Annual Gallup Poll of Public Schools for the past 22 years reports "lack of discipline" is the most serious problem facing the nation's schools.

Classroom disruptions lead to nearly two million suspensions a year! (Daniel Macallair, Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice, 2005).

We lose potentially "good" teachers every year:
50% quit the profession within five years because of classroom disruptive behavior (Jean Johnson Public Agenda 2/14/05)

8 out of 10 teachers report that their teaching would be more effective if they did not have to spend so much time handling disruptive behavior. (J. Johnson)

And, these classroom disruptions do not just hurt our schools. They also fuel truancy, youth crimes, gang recruitment, family dysfunction, drug abuse, teen pregnancy and suicide.

What is wrong with teacher education for so many years that it has not helped teachers with what they really need?

Most teacher education curricula taught in our nation's colleges are loaded with too much abstract theory and too little realistic practical help. Courses in the history and philosophy of education, learning theory, and child development do help reframe teachers' perceptions of students' learning, but they do little to help teachers with their priority need:
what to actually do in the classroom on the spot.

There is a training gap between giving teachers informed perceptions, and actually helping them with what specifically to do for over 6 hours a day, 180 days a year.

Even the usefulness of subject methods courses only help get across the subject matter, IF the teacher can control his class. Teachers want effective classroom management to be a priority in their education. It is not.

It is not because teachers have little or no say regarding the courses they must take. Instead, professors of education have most of this power. And, most education professors tend to select theoretical courses they are comfortable teaching, rather than teach to the priority of what their students need. In many institutions, if the course offerings were more about what teachers really needed, many of these too theoretical professors would be out of a job. Many cannot teach the priority of what these teachers need. Professors vote for curricula that more secures their jobs, than that which would really help the jobs of those they are supposed to help. Some education professors, assigned to train K-12 teachers, would, themselves, fall apart in front of a real K-12 classroom.

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