Their years had not been spent in pursuing a Ph.D., but rather in directly developing the skills of teaching and supervision. The roles are complementary in training a skilled teacher. It takes a few years, to really become good at training teachers to work with some of the most difficult students out there. By then the new hires were gone. And so the cycle went.
Illinois schools are in dire straits today.
The inability of Illinois sixth -eighth graders to read as shown by recent IGAP reading scores is a reality. Anyone who has not spent time in today's elementary schools is in for a shock when these students hit the college circuit. You will be hearing in newspapers that the IGAP test is flawed, but I've been sitting in classrooms and watching regular education classrooms jump on the whole language bandwagon. In some ways, half of the students in many of today's schools could qualify for special education by yesterday's standards. So we come back to the original question.