Governing Quality in Teacher Education: Deconstructing Federal Text and Talk

Two dueling national agendas characterize discussions surrounding teacher quality and teacher education reform. For professionalists, teacher quality is synonymous with meeting a set of professional standards. For deregulationists, these standards are roadblocks that deter high‐quality candidates from pursuing jobs in teaching. Despite differences regarding the means for improving teacher quality, both agendas try to depict their ideas as empirically sound, results driven, and in the best interest of the American public. Organized around and extending a framework devised by Cochran‐Smith and Fries (2001), the article analyzes legislation as well as public reports and speeches on teacher education to unpack how the professionalization‐deregulation debate is playing out in federal policy. We find a clear federal preference for deregulating teacher preparation.