'The Trouble With Ed Schools'
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In his 2004 book "The Trouble With Ed Schools," Stanford University education historian David F. Labaree writes that the schools have long been viewed as little more than teacher factories:
"The biggest single problem facing American school officials in the 19th and early 20th centuries had nothing to do with curriculum or pedagogy. Instead, the persisting challenge was to find a way to build enough classrooms for all students who required education and to fill these classrooms with teachers. . . .
"By 1870, when the federal government began gathering data on schools, there were already 200,000 public school teachers in the United States, and the number doubled by 1900. At this point . . . the sudden growth of high schools set off another dizzying spiral of educational expansion, which by 1930 once again doubled the size of the public school teaching force, bringing the total in that year to almost 850,000.
"In the mid-19th century, the insatiable demand for teachers -- combined with the radical decentralization of control over schools and the absence of consistent standards for certification -- meant that the emphasis was on finding warm bodies to fill classrooms rather than on preparing qualified professionals."
