Dive Brief:

• Former Teachers College president and current president of the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation Arthur Levine is turning his decade of teacher college criticism into a bet that he can do it better.

• The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that Levine announced this week the launch of the Woodrow Wilson Academy for Teaching and Learning, which will run a competency-based program with instruction conducted largely online for master’s degrees.

• The academy will run in conjunction with MIT, offering training to teachers in math and the sciences from MIT professors and competencies developed in collaboration with renowned teacher framework expert Charlotte Danielson, according to the article.

Dive Insight:

Beyond training teachers, The Chronicle reports that the new academy will conduct teacher education and school leadership research, releasing its instruction materials to other teacher programs for free. Teacher education programs are often criticized for being inadequate, enrolling low-performing students, and facing little accountability for the classroom performance of their graduates. As teacher quality has been increasingly blamed for lackluster student outcomes across the K-12 education sphere, critics have demanded more regulation of the programs that trained the practitioners. But, as The Chronicle points out, teacher preparation is a crowded field, and it remains to be seen whether Levine’s academy will be able to make much of a dent.