Thirty Editorials Later Signing Off as Editor

With this editorial, I am signing off as JTE editor. Here are the numbers that have characterized the editorship: 2 terms, 6 years, 30 issues, 30 editorials, 212 articles, and 17 book reviews. During the past 6 years, the JTE editors have reviewed almost 2,000 manuscripts, supported by the faithful efforts of more than 300 reviewers at colleges, universities, and professional organizations across the country and internationally. Along the way, we have offered 17 "meet the editors" sessions and publishing workshops at professional conferences, and every year, we have presented a JTE Major Forum at the AACTE annual meeting. We estimate that we have handled almost 62,000 pages of text-mostly articles, reviews, decision letters, and other correspondence with authors. We have also dealt with more than 10,000 e-mail and telephone messages, responding to requests for information, answering questions, and (fortunately for us, very occasionally) dealing with complaints. Numbers like these have been fun to play with as we approach the very last days of our editorship. But they are merely the surface of our 6 years as editors, not at all adequately reflecting the serious goals of the journal. The editorial group at Boston College's Lynch School took on the editorship of JTE as a professional project related to the work of the faculty. Our hope was to contribute nationally by bringing more interdisciplinary educational perspectives to bear on the major issues of the field and to use the journal to examine more of the controversial and contested aspects of teacher education policy and practice. Our hope was to con tribute locally by using the production of the journal as an occasion for faculty development and collaboration. We trust that JTE readers will conclude, along with us, that we have met these goals. This final editorial, which is somewhat more personal than the others, is intended to make three points by way of signing off as editor. First, I offer a mini "metaeditorial," which looks across the 30 editorials I have written for the journal and also comments more broadly on the role of editorials in scholarly discourse. Second, I briefly discuss the current status of the field of teacher education and directions for the future. Here I suggest that the future of teacher education--whether promising or perilous--depends to a great extent on how several emerging trends and practices play out. Finally, I take the last few paragraphs to acknowledge the many colleagues and other professionals who have contributed to the journal, reflecting not only the wealth of knowledge of contributors and reviewers but also the social and collaborative nature of the scholarly publishing enterprise itself. EDITORIALIZING TEACHER EDUCATION Taken as a group, my editorials attempt to explain, analyze, compare, critique, and question emerging and prevailing views in teacher education. To do so, they identify apparent trends, professional developments, federal policies either under review or recently legislated, and regulations. The editorials also critique new policy reports, empirical studies, research syntheses, and professional initiatives related to the preparation of teachers. Always, it was a major purpose of the editorials to make connections between and among these developments and to locate them in the context of their broader and deeper historical and conceptual roots and relatives. For example, in "Desperately Seeking Solutions" (2001a), I commented on a collection of (then) new initiatives related to teacher quality and teacher education. These ranged from studies of teachers and teaching that were being conducted by several of the Educational Testing Service's centers to the Office of Educational Research and Improvement-funded project at Michigan State University to synthesize the literature on teacher quality. My point in collecting these quite disparate initiatives and commenting on them as a group was to point out their concurrent emergence and how it reflected the public and professional concern about teacher quality and teacher preparation that by then had gained considerable momentum. …