Teacher Education Matters executive summary, http://www.TeacherEducationMatters.com , Page 1 of 7 Teacher Education Matters: A Study of Middle School Mathematics Teacher Preparation in Six Countries Authors: William Schmidt, Sigrid Blömeke, Maria Teresa Tatto, Feng-Jui Hsieh, Leland S. Cogan, Richard T. Houang, Kiril Bankov, Marcela Santillan, Tenoch Cedillo, Shin-Il Han, Martin Carnoy, Lynn Paine, and John Schwille. Book available January 1, 2011 from Teachers College Press http://www.TeacherEducationMatters.com Executive Summary Adults often mention a particular teacher who inspired them as a student to persevere and thus fulfill their personal potential and dreams, providing support for the popular idea that “Teachers make a difference” (p. 1, National Research Council). At the same time, appreciation expressed for individual teachers does not always generalize to the teaching profession as a whole. Teacher preparation programs do not always share the respect afforded to other professional preparation or their economic rewards. Indeed, across the six countries involved in this study these varied considerably. Insights from the Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) curriculum analyses highlighted the important role teachers have with respect to differences in student achievement (Schmidt, McKnight, Houang, Wang, Wiley, & Cogan, 2001). Given the important role that teachers have in selecting topics for classroom instruction, organizing and providing classroom learning opportunities, and the great range of student achievement differences observed in international comparative studies, a critical question arises: how are teachers prepared in each country to teach the curriculum they will be required to teach? This question led to the present study with its focus on middle school – lower secondary, internationally – mathematics and explains the set of countries that participated: Bulgaria, Germany, South Korea, Taiwan, Mexico, and the U.S. These countries represent a range of industrialization, economic standing, and student performance on comparative assessments such as TIMSS and PISA. This book is based on findings from Mathematics Teaching in the 21 st Century (MT21), an international study conducted by the authors and funded by the National Science Foundation to examine the preparation of middle school mathematics teachers. More than 2,600 future teachers were surveyed. MT21 sampled at the institutional level within countries. The goal was to obtain a reasonably representative sample for each country that included the variation found across all teacher education institutions in the country. Four criteria were applied to accomplish this goal: type, size, location, and selectivity of teacher education institutions. Within these institutions the goal was to survey all eligible future teachers. Contexts for Teaching Middle Grades Mathematics The central task of teaching is very similar in each of the six countries studied. Indeed, future teachers reported very similar views about how they might actually teach students in