'What Matters Most: Teaching for America's future?' A faculty response to the Report of the National Commission on teaching and America's future1

Education in the United States is highly politicized. Lacking central government control, teacher education policy is heavily influenced by national organizations and their reports. A panel of teacher educators at the University of Utah was convened to explore and critically analyze the recommendations made in one of the more important recent reports, 'What Matters Most: Teaching for America's Future' produced by the National Commission on Teaching and America's Future and released in September, 1996. In addition to describing the complexity of teacher education in America, the paper addresses a range of issues of importance to teacher educators. including ongoing tensions between efforts to centralize and standardize educational practice through national standards and the traditions of local control in the United States; persistent and deepening problems of under-funding; and disagreements