Selective Admission To Teacher Education

Abstract

The shortage of teachers has led to demands that institutions eliminate all except the most rudimentary require ments for admission to teacher education programs. Many educators maintain, however, that only by creating a genu inely professional corps of teachers, by raising standards rather than lowering them, can the teacher shortage be finally alleviated without serious damage to the nation's schools.

In this article the authors describe one university's program of selective ad mission to teacher education. They re port that selectivity has improved the morale of both students and faculty, and that enrollments have continued at a high level in spite of the rejection of more than one-fourth of the students who have applied for admission to teach er education. Improvement in the aca demic ability of the student body is il lustrated with test scores.

Robert O. Stripling is associate pro fessor of education and Thomas R. Hor ton is a graduate student in mathe matics at the University of Florida.