As if stumbling on agreement between the Fordham Foundation, the AFT and Ed Sector wasn't enough, now this?  In a letter to the editor of Ed Week, Michelle Rhee of The New Teacher Project writes in response to Linda Darling-Hammond's recommendations regarding a "Marshall Plan" for teaching:

Recent unbiased and quantitatively rigorous research from Mr. Kane and his colleagues, as well as from James H. Wyckoff and colleagues and Mathematica Policy Research Inc., has demonstrated conclusively that pathways into teaching (traditional certification, the New Teacher Project’s fellows programs, Teach for America) are, in one important way, much more similar than dissimilar—all bring comparable numbers of teachers across the spectrum of effectiveness into our nation’s classrooms.

The challenge for the educational research and policy community is now laid out clearly before us: How can we get more and better teachers into our schools, regardless of their route of entry? If the differences in quality within each pathway are 10 times as great as the differences in quality between pathways (as the Kane group estimates), then it is time to spend 10 times more energy answering the real questions before us than we do rehashing the tired and irrelevant “pathways” questions.

In last month's newsletter, the Center for Teaching Quality--usually more in accord with Darling-Hammond than Rhee--made a similar argument citing different research:

The differences between alternative routes into teaching and traditional schools of education are smaller than the extreme positions on either side of the debate would have us believe.  Meanwhile, the need to improve both alternative and traditional pathways into the classroom remains disturbingly large.

 . . . In reality, most studies reveal that there is more variation within traditional and alternative preparation programs than there is between them. Daniel Humphrey and Marjorie Wechsler found that teacher-candidates’ success hinges on “the interaction of three forces: their personal background (academic record and previous classroom experience), their formal training (the coursework they experience), and the context of their school placement (principal and mentor support, professional community, and availability of materials).” These factors shape a teacher’s future even more so than whether they entered the profession through a traditional university-based preparation or an alternative certification program. Humphrey and Wechsler conclude, “The line between alternative and traditional certification is an illusion.”

At last, some consensus! So, can we now agree on what constitutes a core curriculum for teaching and how to deliver it through various pathways?