The nation's schools of education are gearing up for Congress's overdue reauthorization of the Higher Education Act. Last week, the American Association of Colleges of Teacher Education (AACTE) held a briefing for lawmakers and issued their own version of what part of the reauthorized legislation ought to look like. Inside Higher Ed's Doug Lederman observed that schools of ed have "taken a pounding in recent years," and are finally putting their dukes up.

With AACTE's new executive director Sharon Robinson exclaiming that "we're not your grandma's normal school any more," the group took great pains to assert that it welcomed more accountability for the nation's 1,300-plus schools of ed, citing as an example Ohio's recent decision to link teacher performance in the classroom back to the schools that trained them.

Nevertheless, the take-aways didn't quite live up to Robinson's billing:

1) Preserve the status quo, keeping in place the 1998 reporting requirements, which have allowed ed schools to hide the percentage of teachers they train who aren't able to pass state licensing tests. These percentages are unacceptably high in a certain number of institutions in every state, and there's a uniform consensus on both sides of the aisle that the requirements are going to have to get more stringent.

2) Give us more money to do our jobs, a request that Kennedy staffer Jane Oates viewed as having a "snowball's chance in hell" of passing in this tight budget year.

3) No one understands us; training teachers is messy and complex.

Violins, please.