Teacher Effectiveness, Teacher Training

On the topic of making teachers better...Arnold Kling, economist-who-is-skeptical-about-pretty-much-everything, notes in his "Null Hypothesis" series that Null Hypothesis Watch | askblog

On the bright side, TFA teachers appear to be at least as effective as regular teachers when it comes to teaching reading and math to elementary students. The fact that TFA requires only a five-week crash course in pedagogy — rather than traditional teacher certification — is another reason to question the value of an education degree.

I don't really doubt that "good teacher"/"bad teacher" is a very important distinction, at least in some situations, but it doesn't seem that education degrees have much to do with it. Not surprising, I suppose, since otherwise home-schoolers would perform substantially worse than those in public schools.