Thomas Mott Osborne: “I certainly share many of his sentiments, but I do believe that H.R. 2211 is an important bill because I spent 5 years…”

“I certainly share many of his sentiments, but I do believe that H.R. 2211 is an important bill because I spent 5 years teaching in a teachers college, 3 years when I was a young man in my twenties, and 2 years more recently at an unspecified age. And I was often struck by the disconnect between the theory of teaching presented in the teachers college and the practical aspects of teaching in the classroom. As a result, because of this disconnect, we find a lot of young teachers going into the classroom unprepared and they leave early, and this is very expensive to the whole system. So H.R. 2211 requires teachers colleges to work together with school districts so education theory and actual classroom teaching experience are aligned. I think this is critical because so often what happens is the teachers college kind of drifts off into a never-never-land of theory and they are really not rooted in actual experience. So I think this is a critical change. And I think this will encourage higher retention rates.”