INCENTIVES MATTER. Jenny D. is hosting a spirited discussion of a recent Chronicle of Higher Education essay by Arthur Levine, president of Columbia Teachers, who considers what colleges of education can and cannot do.

Education schools are blamed for admitting weak students who will become poor teachers, ill equipped to prepare their students for higher education. But they cannot raise the quality of the population entering the education professions. They can't attract top college graduates to the teaching profession, even if they were to commit all of their resources to doing so. The real problem is that teaching pays low salaries, has low status, and offers poor working conditions. Education is not a competitive choice for the nation's most able young people, for whom law, medicine, and business — fields that pay median salaries two to four times as large as those in education — are far more appealing.

He's right about the compensation. His argument about working conditions is incomplete. Law, medicine, and business are somewhat less susceptible to the blandishments of the excuse factory. People flunk. People get fired. People don't get extended time to close a sale or dispatch the trains. The dispositions of senior partner or general superintendent generally don't include being accommodative of poor performance.

Professor Levine has dim recognition of incentives.

Education schools are expected to rescue failing school systems. They can't. When Enron went under, no one said the University of Texas business school should resurrect the corporation or close its doors. Nobody assumes that an agriculture school will save the family farm or that schools of government will bail out bankrupt cities. Why do we expect education schools to do similar things for educational enterprises? Education schools and public schools differ in purposes, scale, staff expertise, and resources. The largest school systems have budgets in the billions of dollars and faculties in the tens of thousands. In contrast, the largest education schools have budgets in the tens of millions of dollars and faculties in the low hundreds. It is a complete mismatch.

No urban-school system in America has ever been successfully turned around. It makes no sense to expect an education school to do what other educators, specifically trained for this purpose, have been unable to do. If after seven years, an urban school system has not made substantial progress, it is not time for the local education school to close its doors. It's time to fire the superintendent.

I have only one unkind question. Who "specifically trained" those educators?

What schools of education should do is educate well-prepared professionals for the schools, conduct research on how to improve schooling, and provide the expertise to assist school systems in applying the research. They can conduct research on why male attendance at colleges and universities is falling, or how to attract and prepare more female and minority students in the sciences. Or they can study how to ensure that all students who want to attend college take gateway courses like algebra.

Why isn't that research being done? Would it be too embarrassing to discover that banning dodgeball and filling the reading classes with Oprah's reading list might be turning the guys off? And how difficult is it to simply REQUIRE algebra and let the college-degree premium take care of the rest?

To expect schools of education to carry out a litany of other activities is irresponsible and unfair. It is looking for someone to blame rather than solving the real problems that we face: the low salaries and status of teachers; the failure of school administrators and their boards to turn around failing schools; the absence of induction programs for new teachers, and, in the end, the disconnect between high schools and colleges that leaves many students adrift. We can do better.

Don't you love that Democrat talking point at the end? Has any professor of education looked carefully at the evidence? Or are far too many of them still caught up in romantic notions of teachers as "change agents" for radical social change? (I have evidence. There's a mini-dissertation on the dispositions follies in preparation.)

In the meantime, visit Shrewdness of Apes.

But anyway, education schools, just like America as a whole, suffer from the Flavor of the Month Syndrome. Has anyone really considered that part of the problem with students' reading and math abilities on tests might be that there has been, for instance, aboout six kinds of "New" math and language arts theories introduced-- and jettisoned--since I was in school as a wee lass?

There's always THE NEXT BIG THING in education. The current BIG THING is teaching students as individuals now-- individualized instruction, for example, and IEPs-- as increasingly my class sizes bloat because my students' test scores are pretty good and my minutes per class shrinks as we try to rejigger the limited school day to meet AYP and still have a championship football team. (As fat as I've become, there's still not enough of me to go around! ) Then we give kids a one-size-doesn't-fit-all test. Those who care about education fail to see that primary disconnect, among others.

After which they're likely to matriculate to a one-size-doesn't-fit-all university. More on that later.