Milwaukee, Cleveland and Florida have created voucher programs allowing students to attend private, even for-profit schools, rather than public schools. Home schooling, which now enrolls between 500,000 and 2 million children, is permitted in all 50 states. Public education also is being privatized, primarily in cities and poorer suburban districts. Publishers and television networks are offering teacher education. New companies such as Edison, which took its stock public this year, are managing public schools, starting their own schools and creating charter schools.
Teacher preparation is in flux.
Some 39 states have introduced more rigorous requirements for teacher certification, but criticism of education schools for the quality of their graduates is rising. A spate of newspaper op-ed articles have called for the elimination of education schools, proclaiming that teachers need preparation only in their subject area. In need of 2 million new teachers in the next several years, states such as Texas, California and New Jersey have introduced alternative routes to teacher certification that reduce the role of education schools. Teach for America, an organization that recruits top college graduates to teach in understaffed city schools, fills classrooms with teachers who have had only six weeks of teacher education. In sum, these changes could be taken for the dismantling of public education in the United States, especially in cities.