Student teaching is pretty common. Many areas (if not all. I can't really speak for places I don't know about, though) have such programs. The idea of it is similar to the physician model. There tend to be a few problems, though. If you're teaching something and this student teacher comes in, they're likely to come in right in the middle of a semester/quarter/year (depending on what the district uses). There's a bit of a flow interruption for both the teacher in the classroom and the students. When going through elementary and middle school, I recall this happening quite a few times. I also recall what it was like, as a student, to have this new person suddenly appear in a class. With all of this and the maniacal drive to push more and more tests down the throats of the students, there doesn't end up being much room for error. It would make sense to have the student teacher stay in for a full year but, as I recall, that is no longer necessary in NYC. I apologize for using this one city as an example, however I grew up here and know a number of teachers here who do tend to talk about the way the system works. Having had family who teach gave twist to the perspective, too. So this is my largest base of knowledge, though I have known others who teach elsewhere and have had less detailed discussions of it. Regardless, I should return to the topic at hand. There are certain times of the school year when a lesson can be squeezed in, though. These times are really ideal in many ways since they allow the students, teacher, and student teacher to adjust to each other a bit before jumping into things. They are also points where it will likely not have a negative effect on test scores. Since every teacher has to be accountable in this day and age the test scores have almost more imoprtance for the school than the students. That's another topic for another day, though. Once is also correct in his/her idea that this should be paid time. During my youth, I recall it being said that it was not a paid experience but a requirement by many colleges during teaching programs. This is all well and good, I guess, but not all teachers go through an education major/minor and would not have this chance. Many administrations ago, it was an unwritten rule that you had to substitute teach before gaining a license, position, and tenure. From what I see now, that is not the case. Perhaps the desperation for new teachers to fill space (and to replace the old ones who are more expensive to keep around) is driving that change. Either track, major/minor in education or decision to teach (which requires education credits anyway), should have a paid training period. As I said, subbing worked well for that. It created what amounted to a residency. A place to do your time, learn, get paid for it, stand up in front of unruly classes, and prepare yourself. Perhaps some would disagree with unruly but I think we've all been in classes, regardless of the type of kids you have in it, where once a sub walks in it becomes open season and anarchy. It was a nice training ground. I also agree on the useless college classes. I take umbrage with many of them, partly based on the "psychology" they like to put forth as reality (again, another topic for another time), though it's mostly because they do teach things like how you should maintain a bulletin board. It is even a part of a teacher's evaluation in this Dept. of Ed. that you have a well maintained and current bulletin board.

I also have to agree with engteach. What school district would want to pay for something like that? Especially when they can spend money on endless channels and layers of administration, overcharge for goods and services that can be purchased by the school, get the short end of the stick on contracts, spend enormous amounts of money on people who are really completely useless to the process, overpay upper administration, pay for the multitude of exams and answer keys and answer sheets/booklets that need to be printed and scored, pay for ad campaigns to discredit the teachers and their unions, fund No Child Left Behind which many actual educators, as in people who teach real classes and do not sit and theorize that it is some utopia, believe to be the worst thing for education in the US in over 200 years...this list could go on for ages. Really, I wouldn't mind listing out every single needless expense that goes into running the school here (and elsewhere, I would imagine). As my last words on this particular part of my rant, I will point out two of the biggest things that I've seen here that waste money that could fund something like this. First, in this day and age, it is inevitable (and should be required) that schools contain some measure of computer technology. In this city, you are extremely lucky if you can manage to get a lab these days to teach it in. The downside to this is that the computers are likely so out of date that the maintenance required far exceeds the knowledge or capabilities of the teacher for that lab. If such a problem occurs, the city has a contract with Dell. Dell supplies the hardware for every school in the city. They also provide the service. Recently, they renegotiated their service contract, though. Just for a tech to enter the building is $400 per incident. If two computers are broken, that's $800. It does not include labor and parts if the system is out of warranty. It comes out of the school's budget. It could add up to a few of those paid student teaching opportunities. Also, the school is not allowed to spend more than a certain amount of the total budget it is given. I have yet to get an accurate figure on this but it boils down to this: Lets say the budget is $3,000,000. You have to use that to pay teacher salaries, supplies, equipment, software, and an enormous amount of other things. If you spend that and have more than, say, $400,000 left at the end of the year, you get to keep it and roll it over to the next year. If you have $399,999.99 left at the end of the year, the department takes all of that money back and may deduct it from future budgets. This money seems to disappear. As does money given by the state to the city. If I recall correctly, in the beginning of this past school year, around $200 million were removed from NYC school budgets. The reason given was that the state was not giving that money to the city. When the state released those funds, $123 million were (was? sorry, I'm not entirely awake yet and my grammar and spelling may be suffering as a result) restored to the schools. The state released the full amount but, unless I've suddenly lost my ability to add and subtract, there seems to be $77 million missing in that equation. The ability to pay it is there. The problem is a willingness to use it for the intended means. I think that it might be necessary to educate the general public about the reality of the situation. Then perhaps some tangible results can be seen and we will no longer rank in the bottom 20% of the 50 most developed nations of the world in math alone (literacy was not much better, by the way. Bottom 30-40%, I believe. Math stuck out more, though).