About Us

The Education Schools Project provides a critical assessment of the ways in which the nation's 1,200 schools of education prepare—and should prepare—teachers, school administrators, and education researchers.

The Project aims to find a reasonable middle ground in a public policy debate that has become increasingly polarized over the last twenty years. On the one hand, critics have leveled harsh and sometimes baseless criticism at the nation's schools of education; on the other hand, those education schools have tended to take an overly defensive posture, showing themselves collectively to be unwilling to hear their critics or to engage in the sort of candid self-assessment that could lead to much-needed improvements in the preparation of educators.

Directed by Arthur Levine—president of The Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation—this project neither takes a partisan swipe at education schools nor tries to paper over their shortcomings. Rather, it offers constructive criticism, grounded in an ambitious four-year research study of the nation's schools and departments of education. The most comprehensive survey of educators and educational policy makers ever completed, this work brings together for the first time the differing perspectives of education school deans, faculty, students, alumni, school principals, and others, giving a full picture of the strengths and weaknesses of American education schools and their programs to prepare principals, superintendents, teachers, researchers, and scholars.

This project was made possible through the generous support of The Annenberg Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, and The Wallace Foundation.