Doctors without med schools, teachers without ed schools?

Schools of medicine prepare physicians and specialists. It is hard to imagine how and where else future doctors would learn all that is required to treat patients, save lives and avoid costly medical malpractice lawsuits. There is no serious call to eliminate med schools. Such a proposal would undoubtedly be met with massive resistance from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Association of American Medical Colleges. The National Institutes of Health, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Robert Wood Johnson Foundation are among numerous funders that have invested billions of dollars into expanding equitable access to high-quality health care across the globe—surely, they would step up to protect their financial investments in the wake of an outrageous movement to prepare physicians outside of accredited, highly regulated med schools. Because the work that occurs within doctors’ offices and hospitals is understood to be matters of life or death, most Americans appreciate the need for rigorous professional preparation in medicine.

Most people have been to the doctor at some point in their lives. In the U.S., considerably more citizens—just about everyone, given the compulsory attendance laws across states—have been to school. They know what occurs there. But it is plausible that some do not understand the full scope of what teachers do. If they did, the elimination of schools of education and scaling of alternative teacher certification programs would be met with greater opposition. Like med schools, ed schools are high-trust sites for the rigorous preparation of professionals who do lifesaving work. Every American doctor, nurse and health care professional attended K–12 schools. Teachers in those settings equipped them with the foundational knowledge, scientific appreciation and inquiry tools they took with them to medical and nursing schools. The overwhelming majority of those teachers were prepared in ed schools.

Licensing and credentialing are just as important in the education profession as they are in medicine. Understandably, teacher shortages in urban and rural contexts necessitate alternative and emergency onramps into K–12 jobs. But the same problems exist in medicine. Specialists are less interested in working in high-stress urban trauma centers and hospitals in low-income and remote communities. The proposed solutions to this problem do not include eliminating med schools. Instead, introducing young Americans in urban and rural communities to medical careers early in their lives, creating more medical-focused internships in those contexts, recruiting students from those places to med schools, and incentivizing new physicians and specialists to work in those settings are just a few of numerous activities being employed across the nation. Teacher recruitment deserves the same level of resources that is invested into physician recruitment. Just as eliminating med schools is not and never will be a real thing, somehow reducing the role that ed schools play in the preparation of teachers should never be a serious option for our nation.