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We spend an awful lot of time in this country debating the relative merits of "traditional" and "alternative" approaches to education. We'd do far better to spend our time looking for what works, whether it's new or old, sexy or boring, alternative or traditional.

The National Research Council's new report on teacher preparation bears out this point. The report's authors found that "there is more variation within the 'traditional' and 'alternative' categories that there is between these categories." What's more, they found "no evidence that any one pathway into teaching is the best way to attract and prepare desirable candidates and guide them into the teaching force."

And that's our biggest problem. We lack evidence to inform our ever more strident debates between new and old.

It's natural to exalt the new and disdain the old. It's common to see the best new programs as standard-bearers for all new programs and the worst old programs as the embodiment of all old programs. The best new programs represent the promise of another way. The worst old programs represent all the burdens of tradition and complacency.

But the NRC study suggests that all those new, shiny alternative programs could add up to little more than a parallel system that does nothing more than the old system does to improve the lot of children. It also suggests that we may find things of value in traditional programs. More to the point, it suggests that the very distinction between "traditional" and "alternative" may be less useful than we thought.

Without strong research on "the details of teacher preparation that are most likely to result in differences in quality" (to borrow some language from the NRC press release), we're doomed to keep having fruitless debates between new and old. The report calls for much more robust support for research to guide policy on teacher preparation. It also calls for more robust efforts to collect data on teacher education. Amen.

Linda Darling-Hammond offered similar thoughts in an EdWeek piece a little over a year ago. "The answer," she wrote,

is not to jettison teacher preparation, but to transform it, applying lessons from both traditional and alternative programs in new syntheses that substantially increase teachers' knowledge and skills.

We have to do much better than we're doing right now. It won't do to stay mired in pitched battles between traditional and alternative routes into the classroom.

You can read AACTE president Sharon Robinson's statement on the NRC report here. (AACTE is a member of the Learning First Alliance, with sponsors this website.)